Anders Hammer | United States, 2023, 33'
Filmed over a year as the Taliban retakes control of Afghanistan, The Takeover documents the country’s rapid transformation and the women who refuse to lose their rights. Starting as the US leave Afghanistan, this film shows the women's experience, protests and daily life in the cities and countryside. We see how restrictions on women’s basic freedoms are enforced by the Taliban on all levels of society. The director, Anders Hammer, returns to his former home of Afghanistan, a country he has spent a large part of the last 15 years working in, to capture the development.
The director Anders Hammer has earlier lived in Afghanistan for six years, and written four books about the country in addition to making a number of documentaries from the ground there, including being one of the directors of the documentary "Exit Afghanistan" published by Netflix. Hammer filmed and directed the documentary “Do Not Split” which takes us within the heart of the Hong Kong protests that started in the summer of 2019. The movie premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2020 and received the Special Jury Prize at AFI DOCS, Special Jury Recognition for Courage under Fire at DOC NYC and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Short Documentary in 2021. Hammer directed the documentary series “Our Allies” from Syria and Iraq for Field of Vision. He also directed and produced “Escape from Syria: Rania’s Odyssey”, which was published by The Guardian and won a Webby Award and a One World Media Award for Best Refugee Reporting in 2018. The documentary went viral and gained more than 10 million views and 100,000 shares in social media. In Norway, where Hammer was born in 1977, he has directed eight documentaries for the Norwegian investigative journalism program NRK Brennpunkt and many short documentaries. He has received the Fritt Ord Award (which is given in support of freedom of expression), the International Reporter's Journalism Award twice and the Big Journalist Award.
