Right, well that was Eliza and she basically
covered everything that I could have talked
about and in a much better way.
Eliza was responsible for the words and the poetry.
I'm a photographer filmmaker, so I was doing images.
As you can imagine, photographing women
in Afghanistan, whether you're a man or a woman,
is very difficult. In fact it's impossible and probably not
advisable because you're putting them in danger.
And with the Landays because they're anonymous,
in many ways, it would have been against the ethos
of the Landays themselves for me to show
their faces, to reveal the woman who
actually wrote this Landays.
It's anonymous, so it's their inner thoughts
and they should be protected in that way.
So I thought that really, I mean probably about three or four
days I stressed about this and thought,
there must be some way I can get photographs of these women.
Maybe there's ways I can do it and I can talk to people.
And then I thought, actually, they're
talking about life around them.
They're talking about what they see.
And so I can photograph what they see
and I don't have to show photographs of these women.
I don't have to portray these women.
So I ended up doing what I normally do,
which is to actually wander around
and photograph life around me in Afghanistan, which is
what they were talking about.
Yeah, so I think what I'll do is I'll show my film
and then maybe have a Q&A and you guys
will know what you'd like to ask me rather than me predict
or try to guess what you might like to hear.
So let me do that.
And in fact, many of the pictures that are in the book
were taken before I even heard about Landays.
I think it speaks to the universality
of their experiences and the timelessness of life there.
The pictures I took 20 years ago are just
as relevant now as they were then.
Things obviously have changed with the Americans coming
and, in some ways, giving an opportunity to women
to have poetry groups in Kabul, for example.
And as Eliza said, we'll see how that works out.
Maybe that's going to be something
which is going to be a problem for them in the future.
The filming I did all in the two trips in 2012
when I was with Eliza.
Same approach as the photography.
I just was really photographing and filming life around me
and then would find elements and sequences
that would suit the poems.
I had somebody in London translate the Pashto
and speak in English.
So you got the Pashto being spoken by a Pashto speaker
in Kabul.
And then when I came back to London,
I did the edit of the film, worked
out what we were going to use, and then had them translated.
So I'll show it now.
It's called "Snake."
And then after that, if you can ask me any questions
that'll be great.