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Dodging Bombs to Capture Afghanistan’s Media Success Story
I re-watched Taxi to the Darkside a few nights ago, preparing myself for a chat with Eva Orner, one of the producers of that Academy Award-winning film. If you missed it, the film takes account of the US military’s brutal tactics during the peak of the war on terror, framed around an Afghan taxi driver who is suddenly hauled off to the United States’ Parwan Detention Facility and beaten to death //
MB: I heard about 10 percent of Afghanistan has internet access, I saw …
EO: No, I don’t think that’s accurate, I actually don’t have the figures, I don’t address them in the movie. I think the mobile phone capabilities are super high. A lot of people have Internet, they don’t have it at home so much; they have it at work. Facebook is huge there. Twitter is not because a lot of them have phones, but they’re not connected to the Internet, because it’s really expensive to have mobile internet, but that will change very quickly.
From a country that 12 years ago was about 300 years back in time and had no interest in anything but water, was wanton to get to where it is now, which you’ll see in the film is the change. It’s been extraordinary. Just the change in life expectancy has gone up from about 46 to 64 in the last 10 years. The illiteracy rate, which is between 60 and 70 percent is falling rapidly. The average age of the population is 24. That’s a really young country. They want to be connected, they want to be tech-savvy and they want to know what’s going on in the rest of the world. They never want to go back to where they were 12 years ago.
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- by Daniel Stuckey