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Set in a small town in southern Afghanistan in the last two weeks before the US troops’ withdrawal, The Unravelling is a story of friendship, love, and betrayal against the backdrop of war. At the heart of the story is a young Afghan woman called Roya whose hope of escaping to America with her secret lover – an interpreter for the US army – leads to an unravelling of her whole life.
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THE UNRAVELING by Nushin Arbabzadah and directed by Roya Sadat. The play was commissioned and is produced by Alexandra Aron and Remote Theater Project
Nushin Arbabzadah was born in Afghanistan and educated in Kabul in the Soviet occupation. As a teenager she fled state persecution and the war in Afghanistan with her family, becoming a refugee in Germany.
Pursing her deep and enthusiastic love of culture, she later earned a first -class master’s degree in Germanic and Romance literature and linguistics from Hamburg University. She subsequently studied Middle Eastern history at Cambridge University as a William H. Gates Scholar. Nushin’s first full-length play Afghan Girls Don’t Cry had a production as part of Kali Theater’s Ware Play festival in London in 2018. Her short comedy, Dust Allergy, was staged at the Wexner Center for Arts in Ohio in 2019. Nusin’s first children’s play, Spinning, was published in Youth Plays in 2019.
Roya Sadat is a visionary filmmaker who has transformed Afghan cinema and earned
global recognition. The first female director to emerge after the Taliban’s fall, she broke
barriers in a male-dominated industry. Praised by outlets from Afghanistan to Variety —
which called her a “trail-blazing director” — her films and series challenge oppressive
ideologies and extremist regimes as part of the global movement for human rights and
justice.
Sadat’s works have won more than 50 international awards; A Letter to the President
(2017) was Afghanistan’s official entry for Best Foreign-Language Film at the 2018 Oscars
and won the One Future Prize at the Munich Film Festival; Sima’s Song (2024), after
premiering in competition at the Tokyo International Film Festival, went on to receive
numerous prestigious accolades. Her rare breadth of experience across cinema, performance, and opera has established her as a truly interdisciplinary artist, whose work moves boldly across artistic forms and expands the boundaries between film, live performance, and contemporary art. Critics have praised her bold, nuanced, courageous
portrayal of Afghan politics and gender. Foreign Policy named her one of the world’s top
10 “re-thinkers” in 2017, and she received the Kim Dae-Jung Nobel Peace Film Award in
2021. Roya sadat is also the co-founder of Roya Film House and Herat international women film festivals