Afghanistan today is a country suspended between war’s aftermath and a humanitarian collapse. Nearly five years after the Taliban returned to power in August 2021, the conflict that once dominated headlines has largely faded from international attention, but for ordinary Afghans, the crisis has deepened rather than ended.
The Taliban now exercise near total political control, yet their rule has brought sweeping restrictions on civil liberties, especially for women and girls. Secondary and university education for them remains effectively banned, women are excluded from most public employment, and daily life is governed by increasingly strict social regulations. International human rights groups and UN officials have described the system as one of the most severe assaults on women’s rights in the modern world. At the same time, Afghanistan faces one of the world’s largest humanitarian emergencies. The economy contracted sharply after the Taliban takeover, when foreign aid, previously the backbone of the state, was cut or frozen. Although some economic activity has stabilised, unemployment, inflation, and poverty remain widespread. Humanitarian organisations estimate that around 22 million Afghans, nearly half the population, will require aid in 2026.
Food insecurity has become chronic. Millions face crisis-level hunger, while drought, climate shocks, and failing infrastructure continue to devastate rural livelihoods. Aid agencies warn that children are paying the highest price; millions are acutely malnourished, and healthcare systems weakened by funding cuts struggle to cope. The psychological toll is immense. Beyond poverty and repression, many Afghans live with profound uncertainty. Families have resorted to desperate survival strategies; child labour; forced marriages; debt; and in some documented cases, even selling organs to survive. The emergence of so-called “one-kidney villages” became a grim symbol of the country’s desperation.
Migration and displacement have further intensified the crisis. Large numbers of Afghans have been deported or pressured to return from neighbouring Pakistan and Iran, adding strain to already overwhelmed communities. Afghanistan has one of the fastest-growing displacement crises in the world.
Yet despite these conditions, Afghanistan is not simply a story of collapse. Across the country, Afghans continue to adapt, endure, and resist quietly. Nicole Ansari-Cox, an American actress who uses her platform to advocate for human rights abuse awareness, summarised the importance of the film Champions of the Golden Valley in an address to the Cooper Union in New York; “The people of Afghanistan have been trampled and brutalised by corrupt men and corrupt governments. This film allows us a glimpse of seeing them as fellow human beings ; they are resilient, brave, conscious and kind. Kindness to fellow human beings has been taken for granted in this world.”
During the Fort William Mountain Festival in February, we were honoured to host a screening of Champions of the Golden Valley. Produced by Baktash Ahadi and Katie Stjernholm, with Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai and actor Arian Moayed serving as executive producers, Champions of the Golden Valley offers something quietly progressive; a story of joy. Not naïve joy, but the kind forged in thin mountain air, on handmade skis, between young people who have every reason not to trust one another, and yet choose to race side by side anyway.
At the centre of this award-winning documentary is Alishah Farhang, a former Olympic hopeful whose personal dream, to represent Afghanistan in alpine skiing, evolved into something far more collective. Returning to Bamyan, a city in central Afghanistan, he established a ski club and an annual race that drew together athletes from rival villages, many using improvised equipment, some carving skis from wood. What emerged was not just a sporting event, but a fragile, exhilarating social experiment; a community briefly reimagined through shared purpose.
The film’s power lies in its refusal to treat sport as escapism. Skiing here is a way of reframing reality, rather than just serving as a distraction from it. In Bamyan’s mountains, the act of descending a slope becomes a declaration of possibility, proof that even in a country fractured by decades of conflict, something like unity can be built from the ground up. As one description puts it, the race becomes “a powerful catalyst for unity and hope.”
But Champions of the Golden Valley does not linger in this moment of optimism. It cannot. The film’s narrative arc bends sharply with Afghanistan’s aforementioned political collapse in 2021, forcing many of its young skiers into exile and reframing the earlier scenes with a sense of loss. What began as a classic underdog sports story becomes something more complex: a reflection on displacement, identity, and the persistence of memory.
Farhang himself, now living in Germany, narrates the story from afar, holding together two versions of his life, the coach on the slopes, juxtaposed against the refugee in a foreign land. It is here that the film intersects meaningfully with the work of organisations like the Compass Collective, members of which we were thrilled to welcome to the Fort William Mountain Festival. Based in the UK, the charity works with young refugees and asylum seekers, using theatre, music and film as tools for integration, confidence building and self-expression. Their approach is rooted in a simple but often overlooked premise: that creativity can restore agency. For young people who have been displaced, silenced or reduced to statistics, the arts offer a way to take back the narrative.
The parallels are striking. In Bamyan, skis become instruments of storytelling; in UK rehearsal rooms, it might be scripts or songs. In both cases, the medium matters less than the act itself: creating something together, asserting oneself, refusing invisibility. Compass Collective’s programmes aim to “build skills, confidence and community” among young people seeking sanctuary; the very qualities that Farhang’s ski club cultivated on the mountainside.
What links these worlds is not just the experience of displacement, but the insistence on dignity. Too often, refugee narratives begin at the point of loss; of home, of safety, of identity. Champions of the Golden Valley deliberately disrupts this framing. It shows what existed before; a “vibrant, pure ski community” full of rivalry, humour and ambition. In doing so, it asks a confrontational question of its audience: what do we miss when we only see people at their most vulnerable?
Compass Collective’s work extends this question into the present. By supporting young refugees to tell their own stories, it challenges the reductive narratives that often dominate public discourse. It insists that these young people are not just beneficiaries of aid, but artists, collaborators and leaders in their own right.
There is a temptation, when writing about stories like these, to lean heavily on the language of resilience. And certainly, resilience is everywhere in Champions of the Golden Valley: in the improvised equipment, in the long climbs up snow-covered slopes, in the decision to keep dreaming even after dreams have been disrupted. But resilience alone does not capture what is most compelling here.
What the film, and the work of Compass Collective, ultimately foregrounds is connection. The kind that is built not through grand gestures, but through shared experiences: a race, a rehearsal, a moment of collective risk. In Bamyan, that connection briefly transcended ethnic and social divides. In the UK, it helps young refugees navigate the complexities of building a new life. In both contexts, the message is the same. Sport, like art, is not just about performance. It is about possibility, about imagining a different future, and then, however tentatively, beginning to live it.