Martin Gerner News Today

In 2003, film director Siddiq Barmak shot the first highly-acclaimed Afghan feature film "Osama", based on the rule of the Taliban in Afghanistan. He just completed shooting on a new film project, entitled "Opium War". Martin Gerner spoke with him in Kabul

The world community and local politics should pay more heed to Afghan culture, says Farhad Darya, the internationally known pop star and UN ambassador. He explained the reasons in an interview with Eleonore von Bothmer, and also talked about the power of music

As impossible as it may seem, a feature film about a family in Kabul that opens a literary café catering to artists and poets has been shot on location in Afghanistan. Despite death threats from the Taliban, the Afghan-American director and activist Sonia Nassery Cole succeeded in completing her film The Black Tulip. Homeira Heidary reports

Judges trained in Islamic law began reviewing cases this week in a northwest Pakistani region where the government imposed religious rule to make peace with the Taliban. The deal is likely to encourage other groups to push for similar demands, says Pakistani jurist Zubair Masood, in this interview by Nusrat Sheikh

Maliha Zulfacar is one of two female Afghan ambassadors. In this interview with Martin Gerner, she talks about her unusual career, as well as about NATO's military strategy, and the reconstruction process in Afghanistan

Kabul's second international documentary and short film festival screened more than 40 productions from Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iran and Tajikistan, plus half a dozen films from the Franco-German television channel Arte. Martin Gerner reports from Kabul

A plethora of new books on Afghanistan have recently been released on the German and English-language markets. Two of them, surprisingly, deal with travel and tourism in the land of the Hindu Kush. Martin Gerner introduces the books

The US administration will miss its self-imposed deadline of January 22, 2010, to close the Guantánamo Bay prison, as President Barack Obama himself has admitted. It looks like the US is sliding back to its bad old habit of lawlessness. A commentary by Balakrishnan Rajagopal

The book "Poems from Guantanamo" is a phenomenon: out of thousands of poems written by the detainees, 22 made it past the US censors. Now it's clear that the Islamists have also arrived on the Modernist poetry scene. By Stefan Weidner