Panj e asr itself seems to be available on Youtube. Iranian-French cooperation - and set in Kabul in 2003. 

• http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OrnbwOfpOcM    (1/10)

At Five in the Afternoon (Persian: Panj é asr‎) is a 2003 film by Iranian writer-director Samira Makhmalbaf. It tells the story of an ambitious young woman trying to gain an education in Afghanistan after the defeat of the Taliban. The title comes from a Federico García Lorca poem and is a tale of flourishing against the odds.

At Five in the Afternoon was the first film to be shot in Kabul after the NATO invasion. It was an international co-production between the Iranian company Makhmalbaf Productions and the French companies Bac Films and Wild Bunch.

The film premiered at 2003 Cannes Film Festival and was awarded the Jury Prize and the Prize of the Ecumenical Jury.

Samira’s 14-year old sister Hana Makhmalbaf made a documentary about the making of the film, entitled Joy of Madness (Lezate divanegi). It documents Samira’s trials and tribulations whilst trying to persuade people in Kabul to take part in her film. As a teenager, Hana was able to amass a lot of digital video footage unnoticed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/At_Five_in_the_Afternoon

Also re: Joy of Madness (Lezate Divanegi) 

Shot on a digital video camera by the then 14-year-old Hana Makhmalbaf, Joy Of Madness is, in the words of its precociously talented young director, “a documentary on the surface but a feature film in essence.” Partly it’s an idiosyncratic account of Hana’s elder sister Samira attempting to cast her own film, At Five In The Afternoon, with non-professionals in war-scarred Kabul in autumn 2002. It’s also a revealing portrait of a shattered society still traumatised by its experiences under the terrifying rule of the Taliban.

“A REVEALING PORTRAIT OF A SHATTERED SOCIETY”

What connects the various characters in Joy Of Madness are their feelings of fear. An elderly mullah goes back on his agreement to Samira and her colleagues to play a cart-driver because he’s worried that his professional status will be affected, and that film itself is sinful. Meanwhile an impoverished gypsy family is convinced that the crew will kill their malnourished baby during the shoot. And the widowed teacher Agheleh, herself only 22 and whom Samira is determined to cast as the lead, writes a letter explaining why she feels she can’t take on the role: who will look after her three children and how will she be able to return to her previous job?

Joy Of Madness captures the determination, the persuasiveness, and the single-mindedness of the Makhmalbaf clan at work, with father Mohsen and stepmother Marziyeh Mehskini also part of a close-knit production team. Samira herself, who also directed The Apple and Blackboards, comes across as a volatile and demanding figure as she flatters, cajoles, and criticises those she seeks to cast. Mohsen reinforces her sales pitches by stressing to people how famous his daughter is in the world beyond Afghanistan (“a thousand newspapers have written about her”, he explains), and he’s the one asked to ensure the wavering Agheleh signs up to the project. But it’s Hana who deserves the credit for such a candid view of her own filmmaking family.

In Farsi with English subtitles.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/films/2004/05/18/joy_of_madness_2004_review.shtml

Eleven years after the Taliban were expelled by NATO and U.S. troops, there is no insurgency in Bamiyan, and almost no poppy trade—factors that go hand-in-hand in the south and the east. The lack of violence has allowed economic development, and the growth of a civil society, to flourish more or less unhindered. Like few other groups in the country, the Hazaras have seized on the educational opportunities offered in post-2001 Afghanistan; Hazara girls have one of the highest high-school graduation rates in the country, and Hazara women have become some of the most visible symbols of the new Afghanistan. In 2009, when President Karzai endorsed a family law that allowed marital rape in Shiite families, Hazara women led unprecedented protests in the streets of Kabul. (Karzai signed the law anyway.)

“We don’t burn schools here, we don’t have an insurgency,” Habiba Sarabi, the governor of Bamiyan since 2005, told me. Sarabi is a pharmacist and the only female governor in the country. “Under the Taliban, we were not even considered Muslim.”

In 1996, when the Taliban entered Kabul, Sarabi fled to Pakistan, determined to give her daughter, Naheed, an education, which the Taliban prohibited. Today, Naheed Sarabi has a master’s degree in development management and works as an adviser in the Ministry of Finance in Kabul.

“I am afraid of these negotiations—I am afraid we will be abandoned again by the West,” Sarabi told me. “If the United States does not fix these problems, then the Taliban will return. Everything we’ve gained here will be lost.”

and

A few weeks ago, Nasir returned to Deh Afghanan. The Taliban were back, practically ignored by U.S. forces in the area. “The Americans have a big base there, and they never go out,” he said. “And, only four kilometres from the front gate, the Taliban control everything. You can see them carrying their weapons.” On a drive to Jalrez, a town a little farther west, Nasir was stopped at ten Taliban checkpoints. “How can you expect me to be optimistic?” he said. “Everyone is getting ready for 2014.” 

No money. No prospect for durable political settlement.

The notion of the tribal areas as a warrior kingdom impenetrable to outsiders has a romantic “Orientalist” tone. I was disabused of it in 2009 when I met a group of younger tribal leaders who had gathered in Islamabad to tell U.S. special envoy Richard Holbrooke that the region needed economic development, good governance and less hanky-panky from the central government. In a move that embodied everything that’s wrong with the Pakistani approach, these brave young men were intercepted on the way home by the Inter-Services Intelligence and quizzed about why they had dared talk to the farangi.

Surely the most foolish move the Pakistanis made was to compromise with the terrorist Haqqani network, which operates from its base in Miran Shah, a few hundred yards from a Pakistani military garrison. This was like playing with a venomous cobra – something the Pakistanis seem to imagine is an essential part of regional realpolitik. No, you kill a cobra. If the ISI had been up to the task, it would have had some formidable snake-killing allies.

The Pakistanis lost a chance over the past decade to build and secure their country. It won’t come back again in this form. That’s a small problem for the U.S. and its allies, but a big problem for Pakistan.

A senior Iranian military commander urged Afghans on Saturday to use force to kick American troops out of their country, hinting that “new resistance groups” could launch attacks on U.S. interests in Afghanistan.

Gen. Masoud Jazayeri, a senior figure in the powerful Revolutionary Guard and the deputy head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said there are indications that Afghans will “soon open new fronts” against “the obsolete, worn-out American empire.”

The U.S. has accused Iran’s Revolutionary Guard of supplying powerful roadside bombs to militants in Afghanistan fighting NATO forces. Iran has denied that it is supplying arms to fighters in Afghanistan.