Born: 1988, Afghanistan
Died: NA
Country most active: Afghanistan
Also known as: Persian: الکا سادات,
Alka Sadat is an Afghan documentarian and feature film producer, director and camerawoman. She gained international acclaim for her first 25-minute film Half Value Life, which highlights social injustice and crime and won several awards, including the Afghan Peace Prize. She is the younger sister of Afghanistan’s first woman film producer and director, Roya Sadat, with whom she had collaborated in many film productions. Together, they established the Roya Film House production company. Alka’s documentaries and television work have won many international awards (including at international film festivals), and in 2013, she help organise the first Afghanistan International Women’s Film Festival.
Due to the strict restrictions on the freedom of women and girls during the Taliban’s regime, Alka’s mother educated her six daughters at home. Alka later assisted Roya as costume designer for Three Dots, a 60-minute fiction film about the difficulties of a widow trying to earn a living amid the drug peddling that pervaded the country. Her sister then advised Alka to make documentaries, so she attended a 14-day training program offered by the German Goethe Institute at Kabul.
Her 2008 25-minute short documentary Half-Value Life focused on women’s rights activist and public prosecutor Maria Bashir. The film included scenes about crime, drug dealing, family battering and rape cases of child brides. As director Sadat produced the 2005 film We Are Post-modernist, highlighting the plight of a poverty-stricken 14-year-old girl in Afghanistan. From 2008 to 2009, she worked for the Pangea Foundation and produced the documentary A Woman Sings in the Desert. In 2012 and 2013, as script writer and director, she made three documentaries for the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) to highlight the decade-long efforts of UN and other agencies in rebuilding Afghanistan. They feature issues related to children’s rights, including child marriage, labour and child abuse, as well as women’s rights and other social issues concerned with education, police and drug addiction. She also produced the documentary Afghanistan Night Story, about the elite commandos of the Afghan army, and the 2015 documentary Afghanistan Women in 1393 Election, about the participation of women in the elections.