'LIVING DEAD' NO MORE.

SADAT, Roya; BARMAK, Siddiq; JALAL, Massouda

This article looks at the new freedoms afford Afghani women since the fall of the Taliban. Roya Sadat wanted to be a filmmaker. She wrote scripts, and studied books on drama in secret. Within a year of the Taliban's collapse in late 2001, she produced a 20-minute movie that showed "how Afghan women were like the living dead." The movie caught the attention of Golden Globe-winning Afghan director Siddiq Barmak, who helped finance Sadat's first feature film, "Three Dots." It won top prize at this summer's Afghan Film Festival. Sadat's success is just one example of how far Afghan women have come over the past three years. Although urban Afghan women still wear the all-encompassing burqa when necessary, they are just as likely to be seen on the street wearing a long dress, lipstick, nail polish, high heels and a scarf discreetly covering their heads. Perhaps more surprisingly, large numbers of Afghan women made sure to get voting cards this summer: 41 percent of the country's 10.5 million registered voters are women. What passes for open-mindedness, however, still stops near the borders of the capital. "Warlords don't believe in women's rights," says Horia Mosadiq, a 31-year-old activist. "As long as these guys and their gunmen are ruling, no woman is safe." Will such men allow their wives and daughters to cast ballots? "Not many men will let their women vote," says Haji Hazrat Jan, 48, a tribal elder in Paktia. "No one wants to be the first to bring his wife to vote." The educated women of Kabul hope to extend the borders of freedom. Massouda Jalal, a 41-year-old physician whom the Taliban kicked off the faculty of Kabul University's medical school in 1996, is among the more courageous. Energetic and outspoken, she's campaigning for the presidency.