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Article snippet: KABUL, Afghanistan — He raised his hand, ready to assert what he considered his right in a male-dominated society where the husband’s word is final. She was an accomplished police detective feared by the city’s criminals, and also a wife and mother of two. Her duties clashed with the expectations at home, despite all her efforts to balance them. There on the movie screen, he slapped her — and she slapped back. Harder. The audience, about 60 people in a smoke-filled Kabul theater, erupted in applause. “People love that slap,” said Roya Sadat, the director of the 85-minute film, “A Letter to the President,” now Afghanistan’s submission for best foreign language film at the Academy Awards next year. “It’s not easy for the people to accept a woman slapping a man. But the film affects them. The slap is a really enjoyable slap — in fact, it’s a slap to the face of all the injustice women face here.” Ms. Sadat and her crew say that just the fact of having made “A Letter to the President” — a feature film made to high standards under difficult circumstances — feels like a victory. But the real payoff is the reaction to the slap, and the idea that they are succeeding in getting a male-dominated society to empathize with a working woman. “We have always had an oppressor, and an oppressed, but we have had little discussion of the environment in which the accused lives in,” Ms. Sadat said. By the accused, she means her protagonist — Suraya, the senior police detective, who e... Link to the full article to read more