Acclaimed Afgahn filmmaker, Shahrbanoo Sadat, who received worldwide attention when she won the top Directors’ Fortnight prize in at the Cannes Film Festival in 2016 for her drama, Wolf and Sheep, is once again in the global news. This time, however, the helmer is garnering headlines for publicly describing the terrifying situation she’s currently facing in her native Afghanistan. She revealed that she and her family are trying to flee the Taliban, after it seized control of their home country this weekend.

Sadat, who’s one of Afghanistan’s best-known movie directors, spoke to The Hollywood Reporter about how the political events that are currently taking place in Afghanistan have already impacted her future filmmaking plans. She spoke about what’s happening to her from her country’s capital city of Kabul as she, like tens of thousands of her fellow Afghanis, is trying to escape the area.

The helmer, who also returned to Cannes in 2019 with her well-received second feature, The Orphanage, described the horrifying situation she’s currently facing as she waits for news on whether she will be able to fly out from Kabul’s Hamid Karzai International Airport. Yesterday, hundreds of people stormed the runway trying to find a way onto secure a seat on a departing plane, following the fall of Kabul to the Taliban over the weekend. The extremist military group is now effectively controlling the entire country.

“The problem is actually how to get to the airport and how to find the plane,” Sadat revealed. “The first checkpoint at the very first entry of the airport is under the control of the Taliban. And there are so many checkpoints on the way to the airport.”

The director added that in order to get through to the airport, she needs to have a letter with the exact details of the flight she’ll be boarding. She also needs confirmation that all the people she’s traveling with have seats. But the current chaos that’s happening throughout Afghanistan has left airline companies unable to provide their customers with any of the information they need in order to travel.

Afghanistan was plunged into the chaos after the U.S. government decided to pull all of its troops out of the Middle Eastern country after 20 years. As a result, Taliban forces quickly retook government control over all major towns and cities in just 10 days. The group held control of most of the country until it was overthrown during the American-led invasion of Afghanistan in December 2001, following the September 11 attacks.

“It’s a great shock — we didn’t expect this to happen so soon,” Sadat admitted about the Taliban’s fast advance. She added that she thought it would be at least a month before the group’s members arrived in, and overtook, Kabul.

Even though the filmmaker was warned the day before the organization entered the capital, she said she didn’t initially acknowledge the reality. “Living in Afghanistan, your ears get used to hearing about how the Taliban are on the way, the Taliban are in this part of the country and that part of the country. So you don’t really differentiate the danger anymore, because you hear these sentences all the time,” she revealed.

Sadat previously shared her concerns about what would happen if the Taliban returned to power while she was promoting The Orphanage in Cannes in 2019. She warned that political negotiations with the Taliban would lead to a return to the strict restrictions they previously imposed on women across Afghanistan.

While the helmer remains focused on her work, she revealed that her projects have already been impacted by the swift change in government. “If I survive this and I have the chance to make more films, my cinema will have changed forever,” she shared. “I feel like like I’m observing, I’m watching injustice and something really horrible, and I just need to save it in my body, remember it and put it in films later, to share it with the world. If I survive this, I will make films about what happened.”

Sadat continued, “I suppose if there’s one good thing from all this mess, it’s the energy created from the anger because people can do things. I can make films, others can write, other people can organize. There’s so much of this energy and we have to do something with it.”

The movies the director previously worked on focused on the details of ordinary, everyday Afghani life. She deliberately didn’t focus her stories on the world of political conflict in the country.

Sadat recently finished helming her third feature, Kabul Jan, which is billed as Afghanistan’s first romantic comedy, won the Baumi Script Development Award earlier this year. The semi-autobiographical movie, which is based in part on one of the filmmaker’s past relationships, follows a young woman who falls in love with an older, married man.

“You rarely see a comedy or a musical coming from war-torn countries. There’s this idea that your stories have to be about suffering – and yes, one side of life is full of tragedies.

But there are also so many things to laugh about,” the director told The Guardian.

With Kabul Jan, Sadat hopes to challenge the stereotype that Afghan women are weak and repressed. “You see a lot of things she’s up against in her work – fighting for very basic rights every day – but you do not see a victim,” Sadat said about the comedy’s female protagonist.

But the filmmaker said that she’s now thinking differently about her upcoming work. Moving forward, she wants to make historical films that educate people on how Afghanistan developed into the nation it is today, and the role other countries have played in shaping it.

“I think it’s important for us in Afghanistan to know at least the history of the last 100 years because nobody here is reading books,” Sadat noted. “You can make films and learn from the past, and we can understand our position in Afghanistan and other countries [involved in] Afghanistan. Knowing history is our one hope for Afghanistan in the future.”

But before she can concentrate on making her next movies, the helmer’s focus is on getting the flight information for her and her family and leaving Afghanistan. However, she hasn’t made an ultimate decision yet on where she’ll permanently relocate. She noted, “At the moment the most important thing is to get to the airport and to get out.”