Hillary Clinton, the former first lady, senator, secretary of state and presidential candidate for the Democratic party, can now add another feather to her cap: Emmy winner.
Clinton served as executive producer of the Netflix documentary with her daughter Chelsea Clinton In her handsa film about the youngest female mayor in the history of Afghanistan, which was awarded the Emmy for political and government documentary during the second evening of the 44th News & Documentary Emmy Awards on Thursday evening.
During the ceremony, which the Clintons did not attend, it was not publicly announced which individuals would receive statuettes for winning projects. But David Winn, head of the News & Documentary Awards for the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, confirms it is The Hollywood Reporter: “As executive producers of the film, (Hillary and Chelsea Clinton) are considered eligible for statue.”
In her hands, the first project to emerge from the Clintons’ HiddenLight Productions production company, premiered at the 2022 Toronto International Film Festival and won the Audience Award at the Camden International Film Festival later that fall. The film, co-directed by Tamana Ayazi and Marcel Mettelsiefen, chronicles the nineteen-month period before the Taliban retook Afghanistan, from the perspective of Zarifa Ghafari, the country’s youngest female mayor.
The documentary began filming 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 band Moondogs and Jonathan Schaerf of Propagate Productions.
Despite its acclaim, the document was not without controversy. Oscar-winning in Toronto last fall Burgervier director Laura Poitras accused the former foreign minister of “engaging in a kind of whitewashing” by seamlessly transitioning to non-fiction filmmaking. And, reviewing the movie for THRLovia Gyarkye noted: “The irony of the former foreign minister’s involvement in the project nags at the film, which flirts with criticism of the United States’ aggressive interventionism.”
Nevertheless, the film prevailed over fellow nominees at the Emmys A radical life (Discovery+), Part (PBS), Doesn’t go quietly (PBS) and Watergate: High Crimes in the White House (CBS) to receive the prize.
