The Festival International du Grand Reportage d’Actualité et du documentaire de société “The Screens of Reality” in Douai has just ended.
Alain Mingam who attended sent us his text and these images of Pedro Brito Da Fonseca.
“KABUL UNDER TALIBAN LAW”
Pedro Brito da Fonseca is a highly sought-after director-cinematographer, who has an outstanding reputation following his numerous award-winning documentaries. But he is also an exceptional photographer able to be double-hatted on the difficult terrains that he “covered” until the last one presented in preview at FIGRA 2022, “Kabul under the law of the Taliban” in co-production with Patrick de St Exupéry and produced by the Perez brothers of “13 Productions” A particularly neat sense of framing, underlined by a virtuoso sense of light, makes him an outstanding photojournalist always able to provide a double-mirror effect of the real – both in video and in photos. Which makes Pedro Brito da Fonseca, more than an exception, an exemplary success to be highlighted. A.Mingam
On August 15, 2021, Afghanistan changed its face. On a day that saw the end of the withdrawal of Western forces, the debacle of the regime in place and the capture of Kabul by the Taliban, the whole country reconnected with a history that had been interrupted on September 11, 2001 with the attack on the twin towers of New York and the “war on terrorism” launched by George W. Bush.
The Taliban had been driven out of Kabul. Twenty years later, the “students of religion” are back.
During this year 2021, the Afghan capital has crystallized the issues.
In Kabul, the former warlords said they were ready to die. They fled and left behind them a population left to fend for itself. Without any further recourse, deprived of funding and support, civil society tried to resist. In vain. Twenty years of war and Western presence, billions of dollars invested, thousands of deaths.
For nothing ? To give way to a new Taliban generation? This photographic series documents this reversal in the heart of the Afghan capital throughout 2021.
Alain Mingam
Pedro BRITO DA FONSECA is a film maker and photographer. He began his career in 2005 working with the offices in Africa of the Reuters agency, during the food crisis in Niger. From 2011, he covered the Arab Spring and co-signed two documentary films with Paul Moreira on the war in Syria, including “Foreign volunteers in the hell of Raqqa” for Arte, which won the DIG Award in Modena.
During the last decade, he has collaborated on numerous investigative documentaries and carried out an investigation into suffering at work in the public service (La Poste sous Tension presented at FIGRA) as well as a documentary on the daily life of a whistleblower (Karim against Mittal) presented to FIPADOC.
In 2021, he co-directed with Patrick de Saint-Exupéry for Arte the documentary “Under the law of the Taliban”
He works as a photographer with the Hans Lucas agency. His work has been published in various newspapers: Paris Match, Alternatives Économiques, Nouvel Observateur, RollingStones, Corriere della Sera…
FIGRA: Pedro Brito Da Fonseca: Under Taliban Law
At the Chartreuse Museum in Douai, from May 31 to June 20, 2022
Alain Mingam – Exhibition curator
https://www.figra.fr/
