Oscars 2024: Elham Ehsas On One Woman’s Personal Fight Against the Taliban’s Grasp in ‘Yellow’

Some short films focus on a large topic or theme head-on, but some lure you in with an intimate story, characters, and filmmaking style and show you a world that you never thought you’d see before. Using this method can subtly and subconsciously lull you into the beats of the story, and director Elham Ehsas has done that with his entrancing and unnerving film Yellow. Ehsas’ proves that he is a director who can transport us with story and visuals, and, most importantly, he can bring a concerning issue to the forefront of the audience’s minds.

Yellow focuses on the connection between two people: a salesman (also played by Ehsas) and a prospective customer, Laili (played by Afsaneh Dehrouyeh). She steps into the Kabul shop to buy a Chadari, and she needs his guidance. After the Taliban gained back control in Afghanistan, they are imposing the same misogynistic and patriarchal rules on women that were in place before the war broke out. Laili is following orders being handed down to her, but it feels like a foreign world.

**We go into slight spoiler territory in our conversation. We have linked the film below. Please consider watching the film and then scrolling back up to read our conversation.**

The shop’s walls are covered from floor to ceiling with fabrics and materials. It feels like if we pressed our hands on the walls, we would sink down into it or find that the space is even bigger than we imagined. When Laili expresses the need for a Chadari or burqa, a wall lined with blue, oppressive garments line the walls. They feel like ghostly specters–the eyes hard to locate and the mouths completely gone. It’s a haunting image that follows us the entire film.

“I have always been a believer in the phrase, ‘A picture paints a thousand words,’ Ehsas explains. “The way we tell stories is through this visual medium, so what the audience sees is very important. That’s something I went into with making this film. I knew I wanted to shoot the burqas very high up, because they are a character in this story. If you notice throughout most of the film that when the young woman is in the frame, the robes are always in the background. They are always looking down at her. It’s this sense of foreboding of being watched all the time. And they will slowly descend on her.”

Every time Laili tries one on and it’s not a good fit, she tosses the Chadari off. It’s almost like this shop is a battleground, and these robes are coming to attack one by one. It’s a seemingly simple interaction, but it carries such immense weight.

“You know when you watch Spider-Man and he gets infected or the Dementors [in Harry Potter] descend,” he poses. “The most terrifying thing about those things is how they come upon you slowly or quietly, and you don’t know how they may have already taken hold of you. It’s almost a little touch and how that turns into a grasp. This young woman is consumed but she can toss it off, but it keeps coming back. By the end, she has surrendered to this thing that every woman in this country has done. This film is  about how women and girls in Afghanistan have not had an education or two years and counting. Since the Taliban came back to power, all the stores closed and all the job opportunities closed. That’s not a society.”

When Laili walks in Ehsas’ shopkeeper is playing music and the owner tells him, ‘I keep telling you that if the Taliban hears you, I will be ruined.’ Are men more careless, because they don’t face the repercussions that women face? Does he know that he carries a privilege that the opposite sex does not? Men are given a freedom to be more comfortable in some ways, but Ehsas was quick to point out that oppression can cross that gender line.

“We live in a world where there is control,” Ehsas says. “Part of the backstory is that maybe he was part of the Taliban–almost like a job. In another world, these two people could’ve been friends or lovers. As much as she is the one wearing that garment, there is something weighing on him as well. There are deep-seated issues in my country, and we need to get to the bottom of it in order to change it. I once got asked how I wrote from the perspective of a woman so well, and the answer is that I didn’t. I wrote from the perspective of a man. There are many Afghan men who look at what is happening to Afghan women where they have lost their jobs, education, and basic human rights, and they feel that pain. This is a film that is a moment of a moment. It’s hard to take on such a huge issue head-on, but we look at the side of a monster so we can discuss it.”

Towards the end of the film, Laili seems to have settled in this robe. She twirls around the shop and the sound of the Chadari rips through the air. It’s loud, and, honestly, unsettling. Every time that I have watched Yellow, I come away with a different interpretation, and Ehsas loves that audiences take something different with every viewing. Can Laili wear this Chadari as a cape knowing the ideals that she keeps within her mind and heart? I kept worrying that the oppression will swallow her up.

“Someone told me once that when you see something on the screen, it goes through your eyes and up to your head,” he says. “At the same time, what you hear goes into your ears and down to your heart. That’s so important, and it was something that I was very specific about, especially with the dance sequence. That moment doesn’t have a specific explanation–it’s meant to be very subjective. Everyone takes something away something else, and I love that. It will mean something different to you than it does to me. Depending on your outlook on life or your perspective as a person, you might think differently than the next person. To me, that dance is her final roar–her final scream. For others, it’s a celebration for something new. Marrying sound with picture is as important as anything on screen.”

There is a brief exchange that has stayed with me ever since I saw Ehsas’ film. Once Laili has a Chadari on for the first time, she comments, ‘I can’t see anything.’  Without skipping a beat, Ehsas replies, ‘You’ll get used to it’ quite quickly, and her smile drops. It feels like a threat spoken into the air in the most casual way. Even if this young man doesn’t mean it in a nefarious way, he might be jaded to the imbalance of power between men and women.

“That’s a comment on the disease that we are suffering from,” he says. “Women have it bad generally everywhere since we live in a patriarchal world, but it’s worse in a lot of place. I am very sorry that so many women suffer, and I am trying my best to help change that.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XTWl-dnDnJI