‘Starting From Zero’: After Afghanistan, piecing together a life again

During her scramble to get out of Kabul, Seema Rezai didn’t get to hug her family goodbye. 

It was August 2021. Ms. Rezai, then 18 years old, had received a written death threat from the Taliban. The militant political movement, then on the cusp of reclaiming rule of Afghanistan, had received a tip about the teenage girl who’d taken up boxing. Ms. Rezai had shaved one side of her head. She’d tattooed the word “boxer” on her right hand. Her coach was male. So when a U.S. photojournalist reached out to offer the athlete safe passage out of the country, her family urged her to go. 

“When the plane started taking off, everyone was crying,” recalls Ms. Rezai. “I was getting far from [my] country, from Kabul, from my family. ... And it was really hard for me to imagine what will happen when I leave and what will happen to all of us and where we are going.”

Ms. Rezai is a principal figure in a new documentary, “Starting From Zero.” It chronicles how she and two male expatriates from Afghanistan resettle in new countries. Among the challenges they face: being separated from their families, surmounting language and cultural barriers, and trying to reinvent themselves. “Starting From Zero” is currently searching for a distributor. But director Hassan Amini, who attended its April 30 premiere at the Independent Film Festival Boston, believes audiences will respond to the brave determination of the three individuals. Though the movie is about Afghan evacuees, it’s also a window into challenges that many migrants experience.

“To see that there’s such resilience ... that really impressed people,” says Susanne Ebbinghaus, a museum curator at Harvard University, originally from Germany, who was in the audience at the film festival. “People who have been here for a while forget about that kind of spirit that immigrants bring and all the contributions that they could make.”

The documentary tells three consecutive stories. Ahmad Wali Sarhadi, a garrulous journalist, evacuates to Germany. Ms. Rezai, who gets reunited with her family, relocates to Seattle. Khalid Andish, a young television reporter, arrives in Buffalo, New York. In a snowstorm. Without a winter coat. 

“Now, I have a job. I have friends and a jacket also,” Mr. Andish says with a laugh, while sitting in the lobby of a hotel near Boston. It’s the morning after the documentary’s premiere at the Independent Film Festival. Ms. Rezai, who also flew in for the event, and Mr. Amini are elated that the movie received a standing ovation. Afterward, one viewer told the director how much she appreciated that the subjects of the movie weren’t portrayed as victims.

“That was intentionally done,” says Mr. Amini, whose formative childhood experience was leaving Iran with his family during the 1979 revolution. “That resilience was on show. We were just fortunate to be there to film it.”

Important steps

That’s not to sugarcoat the trials the three individuals experienced. Mr. Sarhadi endured months alone before his family was able to join him. During the interim, the journalist studied German on YouTube. In upstate New York, Mr. Andish was hired for late-night shifts at McDonald’s. He’s since rented a spacious apartment from a kind Turkish woman and found a new job as an editor. On the other side of the United States, Ms. Rezai and her father were the only members of the family who were bilingual.

“When we arrived here, I just decided with myself and my family that we all should learn English because that’s the important step,” she says between mouthfuls of a breakfast bagel. 

Ms. Rezai was thrust into the role of becoming the family’s prime caretaker. There’s a moment in the movie in which the teenager concludes a job interview by asking for more than minimum wage because she has many mouths to feed. In time, Ms. Rezai managed to find jobs for her mother and sister. Ms. Rezai’s father landed a job in a factory that manufactures ovens but was later laid off. Now he’s an Uber driver.

“My other step was to take my brothers and my sister to school,” says Ms. Rezai. “I worked to find the best schools near us.” 

Then she discovered that one of her brothers was getting bullied.

“The school students were pushing him a lot because he was new in the school and he was not able to speak English,” she says. 

Andrea Bruce, an award-winning photographer for National Geographic who got the ball rolling to evacuate Ms. Rezai from Afghanistan, recalls that the magazine once asked the prodigious athlete what she would do if the Taliban returned to power. “I will just box them,” the teenager replied.

“She’s just not afraid,” Ms. Bruce says during a phone interview. “I think part of that has to do with her family and growing up as a minority group in Afghanistan.” 

Ms. Rezai, whose family belongs to the Hazaras ethnic group, was born with a left foot that wouldn’t move properly. People teased her about it. When Ms. Rezai was a teenager, she saw American mixed martial arts fighter Ronda Rousey on television. Thinking of the bullies who made fun of her, she told herself, “I should do something to show that I’m strong.” 

She not only took up boxing but also aspired to represent Afghanistan in the sport at the Olympic Games. 

“I bought a bicycle to get to the Olympic [training facility], and I was wearing boys’ clothes because people will make it hard for you when you wear something girly,” she says. “And then that’s why I think I was tough, because I was cycling inside the streets between the cars to get to the Olympics [gym]. It was an hour of cycling.”  

“So welcoming”

“Starting From Zero” documents how Ms. Rezai resumes boxing in Seattle. It offers her a respite from the grind of tasks such as filing taxes for her family. A tough-love coach, Manuel “Manny” Dunham, cheers her on from the corner of the ring. 

“They were so welcoming,” says Ms. Rezai. “I didn’t have a car and it was really hard to go to my home. And I was finishing my training at night and he always patiently took me to my home.”

The documentary shows what a difference a local support network can make for migrants.

“One of the big takeaways for me was just the kindness of strangers across the board – from the Turkish woman who takes in Khalid, and Seema’s coaches, and the care workers who help Ahmad,” says Mr. Amini.

Even so, the past 1 1/2 years have been extraordinarily challenging for Ms. Rezai. Ms. Bruce, the photographer, observed a change in the young woman when they met up in October.

“She’s stoic now,” says Ms. Bruce. “I think that that is just a result of everything she’s been through. There’s like very little emotion that comes through, which is so different than the young woman that I saw in Kabul [who] was cracking jokes and super cocky and just really vivacious.” 

In person, Ms. Rezai is visibly more mature than the girl in the movie. She’s wearing an elegant black jacket and winged eyeliner. Although she’s self-conscious about the metal braces on her teeth, she beams when she introduces Haroon, an Afghan immigrant whom she met through her boxing network. The two are now engaged. 

When Ms. Rezai watched the movie premiere with Haroon, it gave her a grateful perspective of how far she and the others have come. The boxer is still pursuing her Olympic dream. She hopes to compete for a spot on the IOC Refugee Olympic Team, which consists of displaced athletes from countries around the world.

“At the end, I saw that Ahmad was with his family in Germany, and I was with my family, and Khalid was in another city and we were all successful,” she says. “I’m proud that Hassan made that documentary. We were able to show our history to the world and how life was tough for us and how we can have a great life here.”

Staff writer Alessandro Clemente contributed to this report.