Chelsea and Hillary Clinton
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Hillary Clinton, former First Lady, Senator, Secretary of State and Democratic presidential nominee, can now add another feather to her cap: Emmy Award winner.
Clinton and her daughter Chelsea Clinton were executive producers of the Netflix documentary In her handsa film about the youngest female mayor in Afghanistan’s history, which on Thursday night took home the Emmy for politics and government documentary during the second evening of the 44th News and Documentary Emmy Awards.
At the ceremony, which the Clintons did not attend, the individuals who would receive statuettes for the winning projects were not publicly revealed. But David Wain, chair of the news and documentary awards at the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, confirms this Hollywood Reporter“As executive producers of the film, [Hillary and Chelsea Clinton] It is considered a qualified statue.”
In her hands, the first project to come out of Clinton’s production company HiddenLight Productions, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2022 and went on to win the Audience Award at the Camden International Film Festival later that fall. Directed by Tamana Ayazi and Marcel Mittelseven, the film chronicles the 19-month period before the Taliban retakes Afghanistan, from the perspective of Zarifa Ghafari, the country’s youngest female mayor.
The film began filming in 2020 when Ghafari was still the mayor of Maidan Shahr, the capital of Maidan Wardak province in central Afghanistan. By August 2021, the country’s capital, Kabul, had fallen, plunging Afghanistan into a humanitarian crisis.
In addition to HiddenLight Production Company, In her hands It is produced by Juan Camilo Cruz of Moondogs and Jonathan Scherff of Propagate Productions.
Although praised, the document was not without controversy. In Toronto last fall, the Oscar-winner citizenfor Director Laura Poitras accused the former Secretary of State of “engaging in a kind of whitewashing” by smoothly transitioning into non-fiction filmmaking. And review the movie for THRLovia Jjarcki noted: “The irony of the former Secretary of State’s involvement in the project unsettles a film that flirts with criticism of hard-line US interventionism.”
However, the film won the Emmy Award over its fellow nominees Radical life (discover+), separate (TV program), Don’t go quietly (PBS) and Watergate: High Crimes in the White House (CBS) to take the award.
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