Based on the eponymous novel by Yasmina Khadra and directed as an animated drama by Zabou Breitman and Éléa Gobbé-Mévellec , The Swallows of Kabul portrays life under Taliban control in the Afghan capital. Violence is neither fetishised nor sanitised. The directors portray a regime that relentlessly and sadistically castigates females and suggests that women are less worthy than men and is even more heartbreakingly pertinent under current circumstances.

This sumptuous costume epic evokes the unique rapport between a French missionary (played by Melvil Poupaud) and the Manchurian empress (Chinese super-star Fan Bingbing) whose portrait he is ordered to paint. The film recounts the feverish moment when the Empress meets the Jesuit painter … a moment when the electric relationship between the painter and his model is caught up in the constraints of the court and its rigid rules of etiquette.