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The cool 1960s- style lines of the Ariana Cinema’s marquee stand out over a business- congested cloverleaf in town Kabul.
For decades, the major cinema has entertained Afghans and borne substantiation to Afghanistan’s wars, expedients and artistic shifts.
Now the pergola is stripped of the bills of Bollywood pictures and American action films that used to beautify it. The gates are closed.
After retrieving power three months agone, the Taliban ordered the Ariana and other playhouses to stop operating.
The Islamic militant guerrillas- turned- autocrats say they’ve yet to decide whether they will allow pictures in Afghanistan.
Like the rest of the country, the Ariana is in a strange limbo, staying to see how the Taliban will rule.
The cinema’s nearly 20 workers, all men, still show up at work, logging in their attendance in expedients they will ultimately get paid.
The corner Ariana, one of only four playhouses in the capital, is possessed by the Kabul megacity, so its workers are government workers and remain on the payroll.
The men while down the hours. They hang out in the abandoned ticket cell or tromp the Ariana’s curving corridors. Rows of plush red seats sit in silent darkness.
The Ariana’s director, Asita Ferdous, the first woman in the post, isn’t indeed allowed to enter the cinema.
The Taliban ordered womanish government workers to stay down from their workplaces so they do not mix with men, until they determine whether they will be allowed to work.
Twenty-six- time-old Ms Ferdous is part of apost-2001 generation of youthful Afghans determined to sculpt out a lesser space for women’s rights.
During their former time in power from 1996-2001, the Taliban assessed a radical interpretation of Islamic law proscribing women from working or going to academy — or indeed leaving home in numerous cases — and forcing men to grow beards and attend prayers. They banned music and other art, including pictures and cinema.
Under transnational pressure, the Taliban now say they’ve changed. But they’ve been vague about what they will or will not allow. That has put numerous Afghans’ lives — and livelihoods — on hold.
For the Ariana, it’s another chapter in a tumultuous six-decade history.
The Ariana opened in 1963. Its satiny armature imaged the modernising spirit that the also- ruling monarchy was trying to bring to the deeply traditional nation.
Kabul occupant Ziba Niazai recalled going to the Ariana in the late 1980s, during the rule of Soviet- backed chairman Najibullah, when there were further than 30 playhouses around the country.
For her, it was an entry to a different world. She had just married, and her new hubby brought her from their home vill in the mountains to Kabul, where he’d a job in the Finance Ministry. She was alone in the house all day while he was at the office.
But when he got off work, they frequently went together to the Ariana for a Bollywood movie.
After times of communist rule, it was a more temporal period than recent decades, at least for a narrow civic nobility.
“We had no hijab at that time,” said Niazai, now in her late 50s, pertaining to the headscarf.
Numerous couples went to the cinema, and”there was not indeed a separate section, you could sit wherever you wanted”.
At the time, war raged across the country as Najibullah’s government battled an American- backed coalition of warlords and Islamic zealots.
The mujahedin stumbled him in 1992. Also they turned on each other in a fight for power that demolished Kabul and killed thousands of people caught in the crossfire.
