THE MOVING PICTURE BOY ARCHIVE
ANGELS ARE MADE OF LIGHT

Title: Angels Are Made of Light
Year of Release: 2018
Director: James Longley
Genre: Documentary
Country of Production: Multiple countries of production
Length: 1:57
Language: Dari
Availability: the director has made the film freely available to view on Youtube, here.
Subtitles: the film is presented with hardsubbed English subtitles
Synopsis
The camera follows a group of schoolboys attending the Daqiqi Balkhi School in Kabul, as they describe their lives in the narration.
What makes the director James Longley such a great documentary filmmaker is his ability to allow the subjects of his documentaries to speak with their own voices (rather than seeing everything through a lens of western ideology), combined with an eye for the visually beautiful and arresting shot. Longley's 2006 documentary about Iraq, Iraq in Fragments, was divided into three equal seqments, following three stories, in the Iraqi capital, in the Shia dominated south, and in the Kurdish north, respectively; and in the first and third of these segments, he told his story through the eyes of boys, as he does in this film.
Note: The title of the film derives from a moslem hadith, in which it is reported that the Prophet explained that angels were made of light, jinn were made from fire, and man was made from clay. In the film, we see the teacher explaining the first of these points to his pupils.
Screenshots
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