Afghan film "A Man's Desire for a Fifth Wife" has been nominated for the US's Boston International Film Festival (BIFF) which will held in April.

The film festival will be held from the April 12 to April 21 at the Boston Massachusetts which showcases over 90 films annually.

The film, directed by Sediq Abedi, was made in northern Faryab and Balkh provinces and took about a year to make.

It tells the story of an Afghan man who desires to take a fifth wife, and through the story line explores the issues of violence against women. It also shows aspects of the traditional culture of Afghanistan.

The film runs for about 90 minutes and boasts more than 70 Afghan actors.

"The movies have been selected from more than 2500 movies for the US's Boston International Film Festival and it also registered in France's the Cannes International Film Festival and an international Australian film festival," said the director of the movie Sediq Abedi.

"I am sure that the movie has a good massage to the world and it's about the Afghan traditional cultural," he said.

The film festival, established in 2003, features independent films from around the world and the US. The festival has presented many acclaimed films including Academy Award winner for short film West Bank Story and includes feature films, short films and documentaries, with a strong emphasis on multi-culturalism.

Two young Afghan actors will walk the red carpet at the 85th Academy Awards Monday after their US-directed film was nominated for Best Live Action Short.

Jwanmard Paeez and Fawad Mohammadi are the protagonists of Buzkashi Boys, the first Afghan-acted film to get an Oscars nomination.

Paeez and Mohammadi play two friends - one working in his father's blacksmith shop, the other working as an ispandi boy, asking people for money in return for blessing them with smoke from ispand to ward off evil spirits. They dream of national glory by aspiring to become champion buzkashi players.

The kids in real life, however, are very different; Fawad Mohammadi is an orphan who never acted in any films previous to Buzkahi Boys. He sells maps in the upscale Shahr-e-Naw district of Kabul. Jawanmard, the son of an established Afghan actor, has been acting since the age of five.

Director Sam French said his intention behind making the film was to reflect a different side of Afghanistan, one beyond the popular characterization of it as a country at war.

The Oscar nod seems to have inspired Afghan filmmakers to focus on developing indigenous Afghan cinema. Filmmaker Faqir Nabi urged his Afghan counterparts to develop the artistic merits of their own movies instead of imitating Indian or Pakistani movies.

"The nomination of Afghan actors for Oscars is a remarkable honor and achievement for Afghanistan. The Afghan filmmakers were previously imitating Indian and Pakistan movies and were focusing on action movies. This movie is a step forward for the Afghan film industry to be more artistic and professional," Nabi said.

Buzkashi Boys is squaring off against four other films in its category.

Afghan film Sang-e Saboor received top gong of best feature film at the 5th international 'Didor' Film Festival held in Tajikistan on the weekend for its heart-breaking portrayal of a woman struggling to care for a husband seriously wounded in battle.

The feature film Sang-e Saboor (The Patience Stone), produced by Atiqullah Rahimi, depicts the life of an Afghan woman whose husband is paralyzed after he was hit with a bullet in his neck during the civil war and who has also lost his ability to talk.

Starring Golshifteh Farahani, Hamid Javedan, Massi Morowat and Hassina Burganm, the film explores the woman's trials and tribulations as she takes care of her husband in his much-changed state.

The film has also been selected as Afghanistan's entry for the Best Foreign Language Oscar at the 85th Academy Awards.

The Afghan film Nasima impressed in the short film category but was beaten by Russian filmmaker Shota Gamisoniya for his film "The Sea of Wishes".

Nasima, produced by young Afghan film-maker Sahra Karimi, portrays the memories of a young Afghan woman who travelled to Europe.

Didor was first inaugurated in 2004 as a Persian film festival, but gradually expanded its range to include films from the Middle East, Russia, Mongolia, Azerbaijan, Australia, and several European countries.

Afghan director Siddiq Barmak remembers watching helplessly as reel upon reel of film footage was taken outside and burned in the street after the Taliban took power in Afghanistan.

He also remembers the effort it took to save other films from destruction after the extremist forces marched into Kabul in 1996.

Barmak and other Afghan filmmakers this week warned that efforts to save Afghanistan's film history were being undermined by government inaction and concerns about security ahead of a planned 2014 withdrawal of US-led forces.

"What is worrying all of us now is that the Taliban, the people who tried to destroy our cinema, are being talked about again as becoming part of the government," said Barmak.

"We have seen what they can do and cannot forget this," he said.

Barmak was joined by director Latif Ahmadi and producer Ibrahim Arify, who heads the government-backed Afghan Film organization.

The filmmakers attended the Busan Film Festival in South Korea this week for a screening of an Afghanistan National Film Archive program.

The six films that comprise "The Rise from the Ashes" include examples of Barmak and Ahmadi's work, all of which were saved from the wrath of the Taliban.

But many more reels remain in need of urgent repair, they say, with time taking its toll on old film stock.

"The situation is critical," said Barmak, winner of a Golden Globe award in 2004 for "Osama."

"We need help or our country's film history, which is also the history of the country and its people, will be lost."

Barmak was working at Afghan Film, the state-backed company overseeing the national film industry and archive, when the Taliban began to implement its strict rule and attempted to destroy old film footage.

Cinemas across the country were closed and the screening of films banned under the Taliban's enforcement of Sharia law.

Were it not for the quick intervention of archive staff, the building's entire contents of feature films and more than 8,000 hours of newsreel footage dating back to before the Second World War would have been lost.

Saved by the dark

Usually light is needed to bring cinema to life, but in this case it was darkness that came to the rescue, said Barmak.

"After the Taliban came, Kabul was hit by power cuts. So staff told (the Taliban) that the floor where the archives were kept was being kept dark to save power," he explained.

"Then they boarded up the doors and sealed off the area. That saved everything we have left today but we still lost more than 5,000 hours of film."

Afghan Film began the laborious process of sorting through its archives and assessing the damage in 2003, after the Taliban were ousted by the US-led invasion of Afghanistan following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks.

But a lack of support from the new government complicated efforts, the directors said.

While international aid has streamed into Afghanistan over the past decade, they claim little of it was channeled into the art, culture and film industries that would help reflect and curate the nation's history.

"Luckily some of the film was moved overseas and we have a restoration program ongoing with France's INA [the French national audiovisual institute]," said Arify.

"But we are facing a serious crisis as we have nowhere near enough money to restore and save all of what we have. That's why we are here in Busan asking for help, from anyone who will listen to us," he pleaded.

It soon might all be lost

Afghan cinema has a rich history dating back to the early 1900s when the country's then-royal family first brought projectors and newsreels back from their international travels.

The country's first feature film "Love and Friendship" was produced in 1946 and by the early 1960s, Afghan Film had begun to educate film students and support local productions.

Many young Afghan filmmakers of the time took up cinema studies in Russia, Iran and Pakistan, due to the lack of formal film education opportunities in their homeland.

Barmak was one, heading to Moscow where he studied cinema at the Moscow Film Institute.

He was in Moscow when Russian forces invaded Afghanistan in 1979 but had returned to Kabul by the time the Taliban took power after the Soviet withdrawal.

He fled into Pakistan before returning to make the country's first post-Taliban film "Osama" — about a girl who disguises herself as a boy — in 2003.

Arify said there were many feature films in urgent need of repair, and that the nation risked losing crucial documentation of its history if newsreels belonging to Afghan Film were left to deteriorate.

"Everyone grew up watching these newsreels, they told the people's stories and the country's stories and they kept people informed about what had happened in the country."

Barmak said the Busan festival had given the group a chance to plead their case to the world ahead of the planned 2014 withdrawal of troops from the war against Taliban insurgents.

The United States has said it does not seek permanent bases in Afghanistan, but is expected to keep a small force in the country after 2014 for counter terrorism operations. Details have not yet been agreed.

"We know that when the people of the world think of Afghan people they think of warriors but we want the world to know about our culture and about our film culture," said Barmak.

"We want the world to know that it soon might all be lost."

The Busan festival closes on Saturday.