Hillary Clinton, the former first lady, senator, secretary of state and Democratic party presidential candidate, can now add another feather to her cap: Emmy winner.
Clinton, along with her daughter Chelsea Clinton, were executive producers of the Netflix documentary In Her Hands, a film about the youngest female mayor in the history of Afghanistan, which on Thursday night was awarded the Emmy for politics and government documentary during the second evening of the 44th News & Documentary Emmy Awards.
At the ceremony, which the Clintons did not attend, it was not publicly revealed which individuals would be receiving statuettes for winning projects. But David Winn, head of the News & Documentary Awards for The National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, confirms to The Hollywood Reporter: “As executive producers on the film, [Hillary and Chelsea Clinton] are considered statue eligible.”
In Her Hands, the first project to emerge from the Clintons’ 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. Co-directed by Tamana Ayazi and Marcel Mettelsiefen, it chronicles the 19-month period before the Taliban recaptured Afghanistan, from the perspective of Zarifa Ghafari, the country’s youngest female mayor.
The doc began shooting in 2020 when Ghafari was still 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 Productions, In Her Hands was produced by Juan Camilo Cruz of the outfit Moondogs and Jonathan Schaerf of Propagate Productions.
Despite its acclaim, the doc was not without controversy. In Toronto last fall, Oscar-winning Citizenfour director Laura Poitras accused the former Secretary of State of “engaging in a kind of whitewashing” by seamlessly moving into non-fiction filmmaking. And, reviewing the film for THR, Lovia Gyarkye noted: “The irony of the former Secretary of State’s involvement in the project nags at the film, which flirts with criticisms of the United States’ hawkish interventionism.”
Nevertheless, the film prevailed at the Emmys over fellow nominees A Radical Life (Discovery+), Apart (PBS), Not Going Quietly (PBS) and Watergate: High Crimes In The White House (CBS) to take the prize.
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