The Boxing Girls of Kabul (2012) User Reviews

Captures Your Attention

[hannsolo · 7/10 · 14 January 2015]

This documentary begins with contagious hope as we, the viewers, discover the enthusiasm that drives these girls to take on boxing. As the film continues to follow the girls as they prepare for various competitions, though, the challenges that they face are little by little uncovered. This movies explores more than just the difficulties of competition. It also exposes the fear, the social challenges, and the economic difficulties that the girls need to face in order to continue boxing.

This documentary is cleverly done, and captures its audience in a way that few documentaries do. The fantastic storytelling, however, comes at the expense of offering the audience more information.

Engossing tale of individual struggles in an oppressive society.

[kenwest · 7/10 · 15 January 2017]

The Boxing Girls of Kabul is an engrossing glimpse into post-Taliban Afghanistan, where life is freer than before, but women can still be stoned and hung for perceived immorality. The 3 young boxers are both encouraged and criticized, and as such demonstrate the precarious state of social pressure in a poor, religious, fractured country. Their fathers and their coach, despite serious threats against them, are all determined that the girls have the right to fight, and so seem similar to the father of Malala Yousafzai -- liberal people in an oppressive society.

In the narrative itself, the girls are at once inspiring. brave, naive, unrealistic, and seen through a certain lens, pathetic. With only amateur training, few resources, primitive equipment, and not even a ring in which to spar, their hopeful trips to tournaments in Vietnam and Kazakhstan become sobering collisions with reality, facing better trained, faster, fitter girls.

So, a story about the human condition, about brave young people, about coping in a hostile society, all in 50 fascinating minutes. Produced by the National Film Board of Canada, it is on Netflix. It is worth seeing.