The underdog sports drama receives a wholesome twist in “Rule Breakers,” a movie based on the experiences of Afghanistan’s first competitive robotics team. This is a story of heartening firsts: Roya Mahboob, who spearheaded the initiative for schoolgirls, is the first woman to own a tech company in Afghanistan. The director Bill Guttentag and his cast get the can-do spirit at its core, as well as the societal constrictions that make such perseverance especially impressive, but it’s also a story that could have been told with more concision and subtlety.
In the movie, Roya (Nikohl Boosheri) assembles the Afghan Dreamers, a group of schoolgirls from Herat Province: Esin (Amber Afzali), Taara (Nina Hosseinzadeh), Haadiya (Sara Malal Rowe) and Arezo (Mariam Saraj). With Roya’s brother Ali (Noorin Gulamgaus) as the coach, the team weathers a series of setbacks and breakthroughs. Getting to their first match, in Washington, involves considerable bureaucratic red tape that leaves them a ridiculously short window of time to build their robot. Their challenging journey becomes international news.
Back home, the girls’ fame draws the wrath of the Taliban. Undaunted by threats and slurs, they press on, their return to the competition circuit captured in music-fueled montages that feel like raves for science geeks, with a high-spirited turn from Phoebe Waller-Bridge as an emcee and event judge.
But beyond the celebratory energy is something more urgent: the teenagers’ commitment to cooperation and connectedness in a world too often defined by war and, in Afghanistan’s case, a long history of occupation. In the movie’s most searing moment, the Afghan Dreamers explain the land mine detector they’ve built, an antidote to the horror of living in a place filled with unexploded ordnance. A girl on the Vietnamese team listens. “My country too,” she says.
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