In the opening frames of his documentary Dusty Night, director Ali Hazara follows a group of municipal workers as they descend from the mountains that surround Kabul into the city's streets. Their job is to clean up the layers of dust – a task rife with futility given the notorious nature of Kabul's dust, which hangs like a palpable, shimmering curtain over everything. As the night progresses, the film unfolds to a soundtrack of the steady swishing of brooms. Kabul, intermittently lit by passing vehicles, appears and vanishes like the snatches of conversation between the workers, and their exchanges with people out in the night. "That's Afghanistan!" exclaims one, breathing heavily from the exertion of transferring mounds of silt across the road, "Corruption will never tire of this country." As he works his way through the street, his words become a prayer and a reflection. "Oh, God … [have] mercy! [This] bloody dust. There's no end to it. What is this earth! Dust, dust, dust …"
In a span of about 20 minutes, Dusty Night teases out several themes that define the city of its setting: violence, flux, internal displacement and nascent hopes. This in itself is impressive for a short documentary shot on a relatively small budget. But perhaps the film's most significant achievement lies in its portrayal of night-time Kabul – a representation that is far removed from the newsreel images so familiar to audiences around the world. Boys play football in the darkened streets, moving the goalposts each time a truck thunders past. Fruit sellers carp about the dust ruining their displays. The workers take a break from their labour to enjoy a small fire in the cold night, fully aware that all the dust that they remove will be back the next day. Through the efforts of a new generation of Afghan directors like Hazara, Kabul is increasingly being revealed in a different light, in all its complexity and with all its contradictions.