As I write this review, the Olympics are being watched by billions of people from all over the world. One of the 32 sports contested is football, better known as soccer in the United States, and the women’s gold medal match will be played August 10. That makes August 9 an auspicious time for the North American streaming release of Anissa Bonnefort’s documentary Nadia, whose subject is the best Afghan female footballer of all time. Or possibly the best Afghan footballer of all time, period.
In case you’re wondering how a woman could play football in Afghanistan, since currently girls can’t even attend school past the sixth grade in that country, the answer is that they can’t—but if they’re lucky and persistent and talented and a lot of other things they can play in another country. That’s what Nadia Nadim does—she represents Denmark internationally and plays club football for AC Milan in Serie A (Italy), having previously played in the NWSL (United States), Manchester City (United Kingdom), and Paris Saint-Germain (PSG, France). Oh, and she qualified as a physician while pursuing her football career and intends to become a surgeon when her playing days are over, speaks nine languages, works in broadcasting, and made the Forbes “Most Powerful Women in International Sports” list.
What really boggles the mind, looking at all this talent well-applied to worthy accomplishments, is how easily it all could simply not have happened. Nadia has that point in mind from its opening sequence, in which Nadia recalls how her father, a general in the Afghan National Army, didn’t come home on time one night—which, as it turns out, was because he’d been executed by the Taliban. Her mother, knowing there was no future in Afghanistan for a family of six women, started making plans to get them elsewhere.
The Nadim family managed to get to Denmark, where they were granted refugee status, and where Nadia began playing football for a local club. An early sequence juxtaposing an adult Nadia playing football with scenes of Taliban violence remind you of just what she and her family escaped. That’s important because while Nadia is a film about a world-class footballer, it’s also about politics and the rights of women and a lot of other things that people in her situation never get to take for granted.
Nadia was shot in 2020 and 2021 in France and Denmark, while Nadia was playing for Paris Saint Germain, her family was living in Denmark, and the Taliban was regaining power in Afghanistan. Also during that time, Nadia makes plans to travel to Afghanistan to try to regain her father’s military medals, a dangerous trip her family prefers she would not risk.
We probably wouldn’t know about Nadia Nadim were she not a great athlete, and that’s certainly the hook that got me interested in watching this documentary. Be aware, though, that Nadia is not a conventional sports biopic. While it includes lots of game footage, Nadia spends even more discussing what’s happening in Afghanistan, life as a refugee, and a lot of other things not directly related to football. Sometimes the juxtaposition of these two concerns provides remarkable food for thought: for instance, the fireworks set off during a celebration of PSG’s success are eerily reminiscent of wartime violence and remind you how privileged most people in the West are that they can have a noisy sports celebration and not worry that someone will think war has broken out.
There’s some seriously grim footage in Nadia—a woman being executed by the Taliban in front of her children comes immediately to mind—but those scenes are included to remind you that some people are playing for much higher stakes than the outcome of a football match. | Sarah Boslaugh
Nadia is available on SVOD from IndiePix Unlimited beginning August 9.
