“You suffer as long as you breathe,” shouts a hoarse voice out­side the pic­ture, and then adds with honest irony: ”Dust is our wealth.” The voice belongs to a street sweep­er. When night falls, he leaves his dis­tant suburb with his two sons to sweep a wide street in the centre of Kabul. It was quick­ly widened by the Japan­ese, who invest­ed a good ten mil­lion dol­lars in the project. Sev­er­al of these mil­lions have simply dis­ap­peared: “There will always be cor­rup­tion here,” says the man who has to sweep this cen­tral axis all night long for a pittance.

Ali Hazara was born in Ghvas, a remote vil­lage in Afghanistan’s Wardak province, in 1977. When his father was threat­ened, he had to flee to Iran with his family in 1979. After spend­ing his entire child­hood there, he returned to Afghanistan in 2004. He then began to take an inter­est in cinema, and in 2007 took a train­ing course at Ate­liers Varan. His ambi­tion is to change the sit­u­a­tion in Afghanistan through art. He writes songs, makes films and par­o­dies TV shows. But after so many years, a dark image of his coun­try per­sists in his mind, a dusty night. Films: DUSTY NIGHT (2011); ACT OF DISHONOUR (2010); RABBIN HOOD (2014).