The Red Bicycle

The Red Bicycle is a 12-minute short fiction film about Mahal (20), a young Afghan woman who is arrested on the charge of a love crime, losing her virginity in a romantic relationship before marriage. After she befriends a prisoner in a womens detention center, she plots out a daring escape to meet with her boyfriend before he departs for war. The film is shot in an Italian Neorealist style inside Pole Charkhi prison, one of the largest prisons in Afghanistan where about 95 percent of girls and women in detention have been arrested on moral crime charges, a term used for bad character, premarital sex, adultery, running away from forced marriages, prostitution, involuntary pregnancy. In some cases, women and girls who have been raped are imprisoned alongside their rapists.