Afghan actress Leena Alam won the ‘Best Actress’ Award in Sinema Zetu International Film Festival (SZIFF) 2019 in Tanzania for her role in “A Letter to the President”.
She was competing with world’s famous actresses including India’s Deepika Padukone for the same category.
This year’s SZIFF awards had movies from 19 countries including Afghanistan, China, Estonia, India, Iran, Italy, Indonesia, Germany, Kenya, Nigeria, Philippines, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Tanzania, Thailand, Turkey, Uganda, Zambia.
Sinema Zetu International Film Festival (SZIFF) is a competitive festival, where feature films, drama series, documentaries and short films compete for SZIFF awards. The Film festival portrays both, World Cinema and Swahili Panorama to a wide range of film lovers and audience.
The award show was held in Tanzania on Feb. 23, hosted by Azam TV.
The film, A Letter to the President, was nominated in four categories, best actor, best actress, best director, and best screenplay.
Leena Alam is an award-winning Afghan film and TV actress and a Human rights activist. She started her acting career in 1998 with films as “In a Foreign Land”, “Loori” and a few more made by Afghan filmmakers in the United States.
She made her debut in Afghanistan in Barmak Akram’s 2008 “Kabuli Kid”, and went on to do “Soil and Cora”l, “Ahwal e Darya”, “A Letter to the President” and a few short films to help young rising filmmakers in Afghanistan.
She is mostly known to have worked in subjects that speaks on Child Marriage, Gender Equality, Women’s Right and Social Conflicts. Her notable work on these subjects are “Shereen” The struggle of a powerful woman, a taboo-smashing feminist TV drama, and “The Killing of Farkhunda” a re-enactment of the killing of a 27-year-old girl in Kabul.
A Letter to the President, the 90-minute, full-length movie, took two years to complete.
The movie is about the miseries suffered by women in Afghanistan as well as about discrimination and violence against women in the country.
Starring Leena Alam, the move is written by Aziz Deldaar, produced by Roya Film House and co-produced by Kaboora Production.
