ROCKABUL

Qasi, Pedram, Yousef, Qasem and Lemar: against all odds these five young men founded the very first heavy metal band in Afghanistan. The Australian filmmaker Travis Beard accompanied the young anarchists from their first rehearsals to their first public performances all the way to international reactions to their band District Unknown. In doing so the film paints a diverse, many-faceted, and cautiously hopeful portrait of the city of Kabul, as a potent anti-venom against the omnipresent images of the country we see on the news. What we learn: art and artistic expression cannot be suppressed, because “if we don’t express ourselves, then we are dead.”