Afghan Star is Afghanistan’s X Factor, and Havana Marking’s documentary about last year’s series of the show provides an absorbing — if, inevitably, impressionistic — picture of life in Kabul and beyond. The show’s 11m viewers enjoy it as a fruit of their country’s escape from the rule of the Taliban — under whom music was outlawed — but this doesn’t mean western values are sweeping the nation. The show has hardly any female contestants, and when one of them, the 21-year-old Setara Hussainzada, dares to uncover her hair and do a brief dance, she outrages many viewers, including people as young as she is. A film well worth seeing, then, even though events have overtaken it: when the show’s presenter, Daoud Sediqi, came to the Sundance film festival in January for a screening of Afghan Star, he took the opportunity to flee Afghanistan.

No cert, 87 mins

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