Fair Observer Contributing Editor Laura Pavon Aramburú speaks with Afghanistan’s last serving woman ambassador, Manizha Bakhtari, and director and producer Natalie Halla about her 2025 documentary, The Last Ambassador. The film follows Bakhtari’s decision to keep Afghanistan’s embassy in Vienna, Austria, open after the Taliban return to power, even as the Afghan state’s institutions collapse and formal diplomatic support evaporates. Across the conversation, Aramburú, Bakhtari and Halla link diplomacy in exile to Afghan women’s lived reality under Taliban rule, and to the question many outsiders avoid: What does meaningful solidarity look like when girls are barred from school and women are pushed out of public life?

An embassy left in limbo

Aramburú opens by asking how the Afghan embassy in Vienna reached a point of financial and logistical isolation. Bakhtari situates the break not as a single moment but as a process that accelerates into rupture in August 2021. After the withdrawal of US and NATO forces, the Afghan government collapsed quickly. Bakhtari describes “the complete institutional disappearance of a state overnight,” where ministries stopped functioning, parliament broke down and the banking system collapsed. For embassies abroad, the consequences were immediate. Vienna lost salaries, operational funding and the basic infrastructure that normally keeps a mission alive.

Bakhtari also draws a line the embassy refuses to cross. She does not recognize the Taliban, arguing it is impossible to work with a regime that excludes women from education and public life. Yet she also insists the embassy’s obligations to citizens do not vanish with the government. The Vienna mission became, in her telling, a moral outpost for human rights and a place to preserve a country’s dignity when its political voice was forcibly muted. She stays because she believes diplomacy must be accountable to people, not only to regimes. As she puts it, “diplomacy is not only about governments; it’s about people.”

Making a film under threat

Aramburú then turns to the documentary’s origins and the practical constraints of filming a story shaped by censorship, danger and funding shortages. Halla describes her first hurdle as persuading Bakhtari to participate. The ambassador was “exposed” and “fragile,” still holding office while being persecuted by the Taliban. Halla began with what she had, filming alone without financing, because she did not want to lose time. Only later did she bring on a Vienna production company, Golden Girls Filmproduktion & Filmservices, and expand the project’s capacity.

Halla spent four years completing the film, making it her longest project to date, with an especially complex edit. She constructed an 80-minute narrative from a “mosaic” of footage, including filmed material, family archives and documentation from Afghanistan gathered through other sources. She avoided traveling to Afghanistan during production, fearing that filming there would endanger local people and her team. Her core aim was to build a film that does more than inform. She wanted viewers to leave feeling personally implicated, saying audiences often walk out thinking, “I cannot stay silent.”

Gender apartheid and the collapse of justice

From filmmaking, Aramburú moves into the reality the film documents. Bakhtari describes women’s lives under Taliban rule as a coordinated system designed to erase them from society. Women and girls are banned from higher education, restricted from work, barred from public gatherings and denied basic freedoms of movement and participation. Compounding the crisis is the breakdown of constitutional order. Afghanistan is now the only country in the world ruled without a constitution or a functioning legal system. Democratic institutions are dismantled, and what remains serves the Taliban’s purposes rather than the public’s rights.

Aramburú asks about justice and the heightened risks women face, including sexual violence. Bakhtari answers that without functioning legal protections, women have no system to defend themselves. The violence is not incidental but structural, backed by those who hold coercive power. Bakhtari names that structure using the term “gender apartheid,” emphasizing that legal codification lags behind lived reality. Language is part of the struggle because naming the system clarifies accountability, and neutrality becomes complicity. “Silence is never neutral; silence always sides with power,” she says. As long as the world fails to act, the Taliban will continue to rule Afghanistan.

Resistance that stays local

Aramburú asks what resistance looks like when public protest is met with imprisonment, torture and intimidation. Bakhtari stresses that Afghanistan’s situation is not easily comparable to other cases, including Iran, even when women’s aspirations converge. She argues that Afghan women do not need to be “rescued” through a Western lens. They need to be heard and supported in ways that respect local realities.

Bakhtari describes an early wave of street protests after the Taliban takeover that was violently suppressed. Over time, resistance shifted into quieter forms, which remain today. Women continue organizing through clandestine gatherings, social media and educational initiatives that operate outside formal public space. Internet access still exists for many, though not for all, given poverty and uneven infrastructure. Even so, networks form through pseudonymous online activity and decentralized support. As Bakhtari says, the fight is global, but resistance is local, shaped by what is possible under dictatorship.

The Daughters Programme and what solidarity can become

Aramburú closes by asking about “bright moments” and practical ways to help. Bakhtari describes the Daughters Programme, a small, decentralized, volunteer-led initiative. It supports school-age girls inside Afghanistan through a package that can include financial help, emotional support, mentorship and leadership guidance. The design is intentionally simple, minimizing administrative barriers so that individuals abroad can directly support one girl.

Both guests also reflect on the film’s reception. Halla says screenings across continents produce overwhelmingly positive responses, often well beyond the Afghan diaspora. Bakhtari notes some criticism of her chosen title, The Last Ambassador, but she insists it is symbolic. It marks a historical turn from a recent period with several women ambassadors to the present, where she is the only one still serving.

Looking ahead, Halla states that the film will continue to appear at festival screenings. She intends to travel to Berlin, Germany, for a Cinema for Peace nomination. It will be screened in London for diplomats linked to the “gender apartheid” campaign. She is also developing a new project on threats to the International Criminal Court.

For Bakhtari, the central question remains urgent. Condemnation is easy; action is harder. The Last Ambassador and the Daughters Programme are her answer to what can be done now, even if the work is incremental. Planting seeds is a resistance effort.

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article/video are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.