Documentary film-maker Sedika Mojadidi, who lives and works in New York City, visited my class yesterday. I know her back from my days in Gainesville, where she was my student. Sedika is an Afghan-American and the video-film she showed us was a short called “Zulaikha” about an Aghani grocery store-owner in California. In the film, Zulaikha talks about her grief over the September 11 bombings and reflects on how she had never watched the footage that day–after all, that is the life she had always known in her earlier days in Afghanistan, when the bombing would start and she would come home with her shoes filled with blood. The film is a tender portrait of trauma, and it is so delicate because it avoids all sensationalism. The writing is subtle but also probing: Sedika asks Zulaikha why she has pasted an American flag in her store. Zulaikha replies that she was grieved by what had happened, and then she adds, “So many died in Afghanistan, America never hung our flag once.”

Sedika’s films are distributed by Third World Newsreel. She is currently completing a documentary feature called “Motherland, Afghanistan” about her father’s work as an OB/GYN in Kabul.

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