Writer Eliza Griswold and photographer Seamus Murphy traveled to Afghanistan in search of Pashtun women’s poetry. There, in cities and villages and remote mountain communities, they collected two-line folk poems called landays, which are anonymous, dark with humor and reflective of a culture that has seen more than three decades of war. (“Landay” means short, poisonous snake.) This film gathers a collection of these potent poems, weaving them together with striking on-the-ground footage of Afghanistan for a charged portrait of the country through the eyes of its women. An example:
I’ll make a tattoo from my lover’s blood
That will shame every rose in the green garden