About the film
Inside the first school for girls in one Afghan village, students and teachers are making possible what was once unthinkable. Girls’ lives and traditional attitudes are changed in unexpected ways.
What Tomorrow Brings
— BY Beth Murphy
status
Completed
type
Nonfiction
year
2016
director
Beth Murphy
producers
Beth Murphy
Synopsis
With unprecedented access, What Tomorrow Brings goes inside the very first girls’ school in one small Afghan village. Never before have fathers here allowed their daughters to be educated, and they aren’t sure they even want to now. From the school’s beginnings in 2009 to its first graduation in 2015, the film traces the interconnected stories of students, teachers, village elders, parents, and school founder Razia Jan.
While the girls learn to read and write, their education goes far beyond the classroom to become lessons about tradition and time. They discover their school is the one place they can turn to understand the differences between the lives they were born into and the lives they dream of leading. And although remarkable changes happen when a community skeptical about girls’ education learns to embrace it, the threats that girls face – from forced marriage to Taliban attack – loom large.
Filmmaker Beth Murphy embeds herself in this school and community for a most intimate look at what it really means to be a girl growing up in Afghanistan today.
About the team
Beth Murphy (Director, Producer) is a journalist and filmmaker who has spent the past decade focused on the human impact of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – What Tomorrow Brings (Hot Docs ’16), The List (Tribeca ’12, PBS), Beyond Belief (Tribeca ’07, Sundance Channel). She is Founder of Principle Pictures, and Director of Films at The GroundTruth Project, an international news organization where she trains emerging foreign correspondents and filmmakers. Her work as a multi-media producer, impact campaign director and author raises awareness and promotes action for issues and causes demanding social change. Recently, she spearheaded a project that built the first free private college for women in rural Afghanistan. Murphy has taught courses covering international crises, media ethics, and documentary filmmaking at Suffolk University and American University Paris. She’s a HuffPost blogger, has produced NYT Op-Docs, and is EP on Dir. James Demo’s The Peacemaker (Full Frame ’16).
Mary Lampson (Editor) is the talent behind the Academy Award-nominated Trouble the Water, and she co-edited Barbara Kopple’s Academy Award-winning Harlan County, USA. She was co-producer and editor (with Emile de Antonio and Haskell Wexler) of Underground; also Anne Makepeace’s Rain in a Dry Land and Julia Reichart’s Emmy-nominated A Lion in the House.
Kevin Belli (Cinematographer, Co-editor) is a Boston-based filmmaker. He was the Director of Photography in Iraq and Nigeria for The Peacemaker (Full Frame ’16). Previous credits include Editor and Director of Photography for the ITVS-funded feature The List (Tribeca Film Festival ’12), co-director of photography and editor for the Sundance Channel’s award-winning Beyond Belief, camera operator on the feature film The Internet’s Own Boy (Sundance ’14), and director for the short film Install: Sound, Light & Craig Colorusso (Camden International Film Festival ’12). He’s also worked on many broadcast documentaries for television outlets such as the History Channel, History Channel International, Discovery Channel, Lifetime Network and Discovery Health.
Charles M. Sennott (Executive Producer) is founder of The GroundTruth Project dedicated to training a new generation of international correspondents in the digital age and to increasing understanding on issues of social justice, including human rights, freedom of expression, emerging democracies, the environment, religious affairs and global health.
What Tomorrow Brings is a Cinereach grantee.
