Pieter-Jan De Pue

Shot in stunning 16mm over the course of seven years in Afghanistan, The Land of the Enlightened is the first feature of Belgian documentary maker and photographer Pieter-Jan De Pue, which combines a cinema vérité portrait of a nation and its young people with the magic-reality of their dreams. In the vast mountain region of the northern Wakhan Corridor (“The Roof of the World”), a gang of nomadic children raid caravans and trade scavenged Soviet land mines, raw lapis lazuli and black opium for food and fuel. Possessing a talent for improvisation and an inexhaustible eagerness to learn, they navigate a harsh reality as U.