Land Without Women –
How the Taliban Are Stripping Afghan Women of Their Freedom
Since seizing power in 2021, the Taliban have imposed a relentless series of decrees aimed at erasing women from Afghan society. Education, employment, personal freedom—one by one, these fundamental rights are being stripped away. Women are expected to vanish from public view.
Yet across the country, many refuse to be silenced. With quiet courage and steadfast resolve, they continue to resist.
Land Without Women is a powerful portrait of resilience. Through the lens of “NZZ Format,” director Vanessa Schlesier captures the quiet heroism of Afghan women who refuse to disappear.
2025
A film by Vanessa Schlesier
Under occupation, surveillance, and threats from both the Israeli military and militant groups like Hamas, how do young Palestinians live, resist, or try to build a future?This reportage offers a raw, intimate perspective from one of the world’s most tense and inaccessible regions.
2025
Y-Kollektiv and ARD
Farkha in the West Bank is an exceptional Palestinian village: the residents practice organic farming, have feminist ideals and cultivate grassroots democracy in the village council. They want to be independent from Israel and the Palestinian Authority. But in this uncertain part of the world that is difficult.
2024
ARTE Re:
RECENT WORK
This documentary follows Nidal Bulbul, a naturalized German citizen born in Gaza, who wants to visit his family in the Gaza Strip. But will Israel allow a Palestinian to pass through the country? And will the Palestinian Hamas government let him enter?
2025
Arte / DW Documentary
Inside the rise of far-right extremism in Germany, tracing the increasing threat to democracy from the far right, its connections to extremist ideas and plots, with accounts from intelligence officials, politicians and the far right itself.
2024
PBS Frontline
The death of an 18-year-old Palestinian fighter in the West Bank inspired the formation of a new militant group, the Lions’ Den. Made up of young men in their teens and 20s, it has claimed responsibility for a wave of attacks against Israeli soldiers and settlers that the West Bank hadn’t seen in decades.
2023
SBS Dateline
Mission Kabul-Luftbrücke
Kabul-Luftbrücke started as a group of volunteers from Berlin that evacuated than 2700 people from Afghanistan in the year between August 21 to 22. The evacuees have worked as local forces, media workers or human rights activists.
The series documents how these evacuations took places. It follows four families all the way from Afghanistan to Germany.
A film by Vanessa Schlesier, Ronald Rist and Antje Boehmert
2022
ARD 4-part documentary series ARD Story im Ersten
Nominated for the Grimme PriceMulti-Award Winner
At Work
