On December 2, Scandinavia House presents a special screening and director talk of a Finnish qualifier for Best Documentary Feature Film at the 99th Academy Awards: the powerful documentary The Secret Reading Club of Kabul.
The Secret Reading Club of Kabul
Dir. Shakiba Adil, Elina Hirvonen | Finland/Norway, 2026 | 95 min
In Taliban-controlled Afghanistan, where women are denied the right to study, work, and speak freely, a group of young women make a radical choice: they read. Inspired by Anne Frank, they secretly form a reading club and begin writing their own diaries — not as victims, but as witnesses. The Secret Reading Club becomes an act of resistance: documenting their lives as a timeless defense of humanity, beyond borders or eras.
Partially filmed by the women themselves, The Secret Reading Club of Kabul is an intimate and confidential testimony to the power of art to keep hope and humanism alive. It is also a moving declaration of love for literature and for the act of reading itself. The story is interwoven with director Shakiba Adil’s own journey. As a girl, she grew up under the first Taliban regime, and after the fall of the Taliban, she became the first woman to appear on Afghan television. After being forced to flee her homeland twice, she has now dedicated her film to the new generation facing the same oppression she herself has endured.
ABOUT THE DIRECTORS
Shakiba Adil is a documentary filmmaker, journalist, educator, and women’s rights activist born and raised in Kabul and living in Finland. She grew up under the first Taliban regime and, after its fall in 2001, became the first woman to appear on Afghan television as well as one of the country’s first female documentary filmmakers. Her film, Afghanistan Unveiled (2002), co-directed with an Afghan-French team, was nominated for an Emmy in 2004. Adil has directed documentaries for, among others, the Finnish broadcasting company Yle, combining lived experience and inside knowledge of Afghanistan with an uncompromising artistic voice.
Elina Hirvonen is an award-winning Finnish documentary filmmaker and author whose work has been recognized internationally. Her first feature Paradise: Three Journeys in This World won the main prize for student films at IDFA 2007. Boiling Point, 2017, was named Best Documentary at the Lübeck Nordisk Film Days and Uruguay’s Tenemos Que Ver festival. She has recently been awarded the WSOY Foundation Recognition Award for artistic achievement (2023), the Finnish Red Cross Human Reach Award (2024) and both the Finnish PEN and International Press Institute Finland awards for her contributions to freedom of expression.