Women-only event at Afghan arts, music festival
The Sound Central festival includes rock bands, short films and a range of other cultural activities aimed at young Afghans.
While the festival officially begins today, yesterday there was a special "women only" event to compensate for the testosterone-driven male-ness that can dominate many rock festivals, anywhere in the world.
Presenter: Liam Cochrane
Speaker: Travis Beard, Sound Central organiser
BEARD: We have a really cool band that's come over from Sri Lanka, called Paranoid Earthling. They're basically like a sort of grunge rock band, a bunch of four young, well actually not too young, but four young Sri Lankan guys and we got them over. It took quite a lot of work to get them here, because obviously Sri Lankan passports aren't much better than Afghan passports. So to get them here it was quite a mission. But they're a great young bunch of boys and I think we found may be a sort of new frontier for music in Sri Lanka. I've been talking to these kids and they have virtually a whole scene over there, but there's no festivals. They were already talking about doing some cross exchange stuff between Sri Lanka and Afghanistan, which is perfect We also have Ariana Delawari, who has come from America. She's basically world experimental, traditional music, with a sort of an Afghan twist. She's actually Afghan-American, but has spent most of her life in LA. And there's quite a bit Persian -Afghan community in LA, so she's quite big over there. And I think she's going to bring a bit more of a sort of folk-singer-songwriter field to the festival, because a lot of the other parts are quite heavy, rocky, kind of groups, so it's going to balance out quite nice.
COCHRANE: And it's not just music this year. Tell us about the Film Festival and some of the other sort of cultural events that are wrapped into this festival?
BEARD: Yes, so obviously, the idea is to start expanding this festival into a more arts festival. We have a short film festival from the company Future Cinema in England who also does Secret Cinema and basically showing five short films from their Autumn Festival, plus we're also doing the official Afghan premier of the award winning short film "Buzkashi Boys" which is made by an American director. He's been based in Afghanistan for at least the last five years, Sam French, and so we're previewing his film for the first time in the country which is really exciting. Plus besides that, we have photography exhibitions, we have everything from henna painting on hands to women's bowling through to Taekwondo displays. We have live graffiti painting, we have a lot of different sort of cultural activities, so when the Afghans come down to this festival, they're not just only seeing music, they're also seeing other activities that they can be involved in and therefore we started creating a festival feel.
COCHRANE: Tell us a little bit about the challenges of organising a festival like this and particular this year's?
BEARD: Well, always the biggest challenge is getting the musicians here, because of the current state of affairs in Afghanistan. What the musicians see on the news in their own country is not always relative to what we have on the ground here. So we had some musicians pull out this year, because they just, them or their parents or their friends saw the news and went oh, Afghanistan is too dangerous, Afghanistan is too risky at the moment, I don't want you going over there and musicians pulled for this reason, so this is always a challenge. And then besides that, it's actually getting musicians here. Our budgets are not big, so flights and accommodation and visas all that stuff is like a challenge to get the musicians here. Besides that, equipment was a massive challenge here, because we can't buy equipment in the country, so things like drum kits, amplifiers and all the stuff you see on the stage we had to buy in a place like let's say Dubai and then get it shipped in by a company so that we can have what we consider a semi-professional stage, obviously nothing like what let's say U2 and Metallica has, but pretty good for Afghanistan that's always a challenge.
Advertising for the festival was also a bit tricky. We do have an advertising campaign on television, but we didn't actually reveal the location of the festival until two days before. Everyone knew about the dates for the festival for the first two weeks and we had a lot of commercials out there pumping out the dates, but we only just released the location two days ago. And we did this to try and keep the whole event a little bit under the radar let's say so that if anyone wanted to disrupt the festival, they've got less time to plan such a thing.
COCHRANE: And how are you feeling about security and how's the cooperation been with local authorities?
BEARD: Well, we're really lucky that the venue which is the French Cultural Centre has been open for ten years, and until today, there's never been an incident. And we're also quite fortunate that the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Economy, the Serena Hotel which is a five star hotel. They're all within 500 metres, also the mayor's office is all within 500 metres of the actual venue where we're having the festival at. So there's a lot of security in the area, so it's really good that we have all this availability of authority and police within basically a shout and we can get them down here if anything happens. Plus we also the grounds of the festival actually back onto the presidential palace where President Karzai lives and he has a decree that anyone who has property back onto his palace has to use presidential guards as security which is his own rules. So we actually have presidential guards to secure the festival grounds, so I mean they're pretty dam good, because that's their job. So we're pretty confident along with our own small private security firm that looks after the internal side of security. We're pretty confident that the place is secure.
COCHRANE: Does that leave open the possibility though that President Karzai might tell you to turn things down if it all gets a bit loud?
BEARD: I mean he's not that close, because his palace his quite massive. It's not like he's bedroom backs onto the festival. But we actually do finish the festival at 8 o'clock at night, and that's because basically local Afghan traditions don't really play music late in the day and also for the sort of presidential family, we kind of keep things to a certain hour, so that we're not disturbing them. But, I mean honestly, we've been playing concerts at this same venue for the last three years and we've never managed to make that call.
COCHRANE: Good to keep a neighbour like that on side though just the same.
BEARD: Exactly.