Five years after the Taliban returned to power, Afghan women are barred from secondary school, university and much of public life. In Kabul, a small group of young women meets anyway, in secret, to do something now forbidden to them: read together.

Filmed from inside that circle, where discovery could cost them everything, Shakiba Adil and Elina Hirvonen's film captures what headlines cannot: careers and studies abruptly foreclosed, friendships that become lifelines, and the quiet defiance of turning a page. In The Diary of Anne Frank, they find parallels to their own isolation and their deferred dreams, acknowledging that Anne Frank "had it worse." As they search Anne's diary for ways to endure their own confinement, the film becomes an act of witness in its own right, preserving voices that the authorities have tried hard to silence.