Leena Alam

Film work

At the start of her career, Alam modeled and took part in dance competitions. In 1994 she participated in Mr and Miss San Francisco India Pageant organized by Rennu Dhillon, where she captivated the audience with one and half minute Dance performance and was awarded the Best Talent winner. Her first movie was (Promise of Love), produced by Tarin Films. But it was In Foreign Land directed by Hafiz Asefi which was released first in 1998.

In در سرزمین بیگانه (In Foreign Land), she played an Indian girl who had come to the United States to study but was devoted to her traditions and values. It was during the casting for this movie that Alam met Salaam Sangi, who would become her mentor. In Loori, by Orokzai Films, she played a traumatized Afghan girl with a brain injury who had forgotten her past. Alam has called this film—written specifically for her by Hamid Naweed, a poet, writer, and painter—one of her favorites.

In 2007, Alam returned to Kabul and appeared with Hadji Gul in Kabuli Kid, a French-Afghan drama produced by Fidélité Films directed by Barmak Akram. In 2013, she was in Soil and Coral an Iranian-Afghan film, produced by Parween Hussaini and directed by Masoud Atyabi. Also in 2013, she played one of the lead roles in the second season of the popular TV serial Kocha e Maa, directed by Mirwais Rekab. In 2014, she was in Ahwal e Darya produced by Axobaraxfilms, directed by Homayoun Karimpour and Black Kite by Tarique Qayumi. (Shereen) The struggle of a powerful woman a taboo-smashing feminist TV drama directed by Ghafar Azad produced at Kaboora/Tolo Tv was her latest work in 2016 playing the title role Shereen, and A Letter to the President نامه ی به رئيس جمهور a film directed by Roya Sadat. She also did a few short films to help young filmmakers in Afghanistan, starring in Siyar Noorzad's Moving in a Circle and Lal Alizada's Live in Grave. , The Unknown by Ghafar Faizyar, "Qamar" by Nima Latifi and (In parentheses) directed by Ghafar Azad.

Alam has been a member of the jury at the Negah-e-No Film Festival in 2014 and 2015, also member of the jury at the Afghanistan Human Right Film festival 2015, The Afghan International Film Festival in Stockholm, Sweden 2016, the 8th National Theater Festival Afghanistan 2014 and International Feature Fiction Jury member at Adelaide Film Festival, Australia 2017. She has appeared in music videos for Shafiq Mureed, Arash Barez, and Kerry Coulshed.

Currently she is performing on the historic stage of The monastery ruin in Bad Hersfelder Festspiele, Germany. She is playing Solveig in Peer Gynt by the Norwegian dramatist Henrik Ibsen, directed by Robert Schuster the German theater director and professor at the Ernst Busch Academy of Dramatic Arts in Berlin.

Social activism

Alam was named peace ambassador of the United Nations Assistance Mission in Afghanistan (UNAMA) in 2009.

Forty days after Farkhunda, a 27-year-old Afghan woman falsely accused of burning a copy of the Quran, was publicly beaten and burnt to death^[1] on March 19, 2015, Alam joined activists in Kabul to stage a re-enactment of the killing. She played the role of Farkhunda. The New York Times reported:

On the morning of the re-enactment, Ms. Alam woke up with butterflies in her stomach. Though she is an experienced film actor, she said it was proving a tough role. For one thing, Ms. Alam had been among the mourners at Farkhunda’s burial, and it was the first real dead body she had ever seen, she said. [...]

She and her fellow actors agreed then that there would be no crying during their performance, but in rehearsals, they all kept bursting into tears. "The workers, my director, everyone, we were just mental," she said. One person would cry, then she did. "I kept saying, ‘Don’t make me weak, I don’t want to cry."

During the re-enactment, some of her fellow actors got a little too into character, she said, and though their rocks and clubs were made of sponge or foam, her face began to sting from all the blows, and she came away a bit bruised. Spectators often gasped because it seemed so real, and even some of the policemen were seen to be weeping.^[2]