By Farasat Ali Zada , for CNN Written by
Abandoned buildings, locked gates and VIP lanes at Kabul’s airport make for a desolate scene. But for the 71,000 people who made the trip to and from Afghanistan’s capital in 2016, life as a passenger on the “Safe Journey” airline was just as frustrating, chilling and, well, “scary.”
“On the flight, we experienced bomb threats, bomb explosions, who knows what other bombs there might be inside the bags that we were taking,” says Negin Nasrullah, a 26-year-old student from Kabul who used the airline to escape Afghanistan for university in India.
Nasrullah is one of over 100,000 Afghan refugees and asylum seekers that have managed to emigrate to the West, many of them boarding planes at Kabul’s main airport, the largest in the world. It’s a scenario that director Sean Ryan used to depict as part of the chilling drama “The Last 96.”
The film premiered in July at the Toronto International Film Festival , in a dystopian world where air traffic and passenger lives hang in the balance, echoing the actual paths that Afghans have taken to settle in the Western world.
The film’s concept of survival and escape is the same one that migrant and refugee advocates struggle with everyday, traveling through the labyrinth of smuggler networks.
From a safe distance
Hannah Oliveira, the film’s writer and director, caught a glimpse of the world that Nasrullah and thousands of others had fled as a refugee child when she visited her childhood home in Kabul in 2013.
“I wasn’t filming the actual airports but the living nightmares of the crisis was quite striking to me,” she says.
Oliveira sought to document “the lives of Afghan asylum seekers and displaced people.”
She acknowledges the precarious nature of these lives, describing her experience as one “that’s not realistic.”
“You see other films that depict real refugee stories, and often the details are so extreme — how you leave your country as a small child and live your entire life as a refugee in a different country. It’s crazy how they turn out to be so believable,” she says.
“These refugees are real.”
Facing authorities
However, the frequent suicide bomb attacks that have hit Kabul in recent years add a dash of reality to the banal events of life as a passenger on Safe Journey, when unchecked security and experience tells travelers they are safer in luxury cars than a rickety bus.
A typical “Safe Journey” passenger seems well aware of that fact.
“In the back of my mind, I’m thinking about the war going on over here,” said Kouda Nusrat, a 27-year-old aviation journalist and transport consultant who made the trip from Kabul to Doha last year.
“But on the other hand I’m also saying there’s no place like being here. I had never seen anything like it. I’m happy I didn’t stay at home anymore. I wish I had another chance to come back and I would,” she says, noting that because her passport expires after three years, she may never get another chance to travel overseas.
Krempesh Niraga, the head of the UN High Commissioner for Refugees in Afghanistan, agrees that the novelty of air travel has evaporated.
“We aren’t talking about the first year because there is a lot of awareness that one of these systems (airport security) hasn’t been perfect. Things like bomb threats,” he says.
“There’s a saturation point for this,” he adds.
“The truth is that there is no genuine escape from this country. People cannot leave.”
The last 96 is set in a stifling Kabul Airport lobby, where travelers must navigate a maze of security checkpoints and VIP lanes.
Yet, the same anxieties and trauma that give the film its somber tone are often felt by the passengers, although in a different way.
