Super Afghan Gym (2026)
I went into Super Afghan Gym, Shahrbanoo Sadat's short film, wanting very much to like it. Sadat is a real talent, the woman behind Wolf and Sheep and The Orphanage, and this comes out of Cate Blanchett's Displacement Film Fund, a genuinely worthwhile scheme giving displaced film-makers the resources to tell their stories. I caught it at the BFI London Film Festival and I am entirely behind the project that produced it. The film itself, though, left me a little cold, and I have to be honest and give it two stars.
The premise has real quiet power on paper. In a gym in downtown Kabul, a group of housewives gather during the one hour of the day set aside for women, training behind closed doors at lunchtime and talking, about their bodies, their children, the small texture of their daily lives. Knowing the context in which Afghan women now live, that image of a private hour snatched behind locked doors carries an undeniable charge, and you sense Sadat drawing on something she knows intimately.
And yet, for me, that is more or less all there is. The film is content to observe the chatter and the exercise, the companionship and the grumbles about body norms, without ever shaping it into something that builds or lands. Across its fourteen minutes very little actually happens, and while I understand that the ordinariness is partly the point, a slice of life that would otherwise go unseen, I kept waiting for a moment of real insight or emotional lift that never arrived.
It is warmly made and the women are easy company, so it is not an unpleasant watch, just a curiously weightless one. There is a version of this exact material that uses its precious hour to say something piercing about freedom, surveillance or female solidarity under pressure, and the frustrating thing is how clearly you can feel that stronger film hovering just out of reach. The ingredients are all here, the execution simply never raises the stakes.
Two stars. I remain delighted that the Displacement Film Fund exists and that film-makers like Sadat are getting these opportunities, which is exactly why I wanted more from this one. Super Afghan Gym is gentle, observational and well intentioned, but it felt like a slim and slightly wasted use of a rare chance, a lovely idea for a scene in search of the film it never quite becomes.
Related on Movies With Macca
More from Country Afghanistan: The White Diamond (2004), Osama (2003), Three Songs for Benazir (2021)
More from the 2020s: All That's Left of You (2025), The Whale (2022), Look Back (2024)
More documentary: Sumo: Spirit Weighs Nothing (2026), Listen (2026), Mon Taxi (2026)
