Chelsea and Hillary Clinton
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Hillary Clinton, the former First Lady, Senator, Secretary of State and Democratic Party presidential candidate, can now claim another honor: Emmy winner.
Clinton was an executive producer, along with her daughter Chelsea Clinton, of the Netflix documentary “In Her Hands,” a film about the youngest mayor in Afghanistan’s history, which won the Emmy for Politics and Government Documentary on Thursday night, the second night of the 44th. News & Documentary Emmy Awards.
At the ceremony, which the Clintons did not attend, it was not publicly announced which people would receive statuettes for winning projects. But David Winn, director of the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences’ News & Documentary Awards, confirms to : “As executive producers of the film [Hillary and Chelsea Clinton] are considered worthy of statute.”
“In Her Hands,” the first project from the Clintons’ production company HiddenLight Productions, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in 2022 and won the Audience Award at the Camden International Film Festival later that fall. Co-directed by Tamana Ayazi and Marcel Mettelsiefen, the film chronicles the 19-month period before the Taliban recaptured Afghanistan from the perspective of Zarifa Ghafari, the country’s youngest mayor.
Filming for the documentary began in 2020, when Ghafari was still mayor of Maidan Shahr, the capital of Maidan Wardak province in central Afghanistan. In August 2021, the country’s capital, Kabul, fell, plunging Afghanistan into a humanitarian crisis.
In addition to HiddenLight Productions, “In Her Hands” was produced by Juan Camilo Cruz of the group Moondogs and Jonathan Schaerf of Propagate Productions.
Despite its acclaim, the document was not without controversy. In Toronto last fall, Oscar-winning Citizenfour director Laura Poitras accused the former secretary of state of “sort of whitewashing” by seamlessly transitioning into making nonfiction films. And when Lovia Gyarkye reviewed the film for THR, she noted, “The irony of the former secretary of state’s involvement in the project mars the film, which flirts with criticism of the United States’ aggressive interventionism.”
Nevertheless, the film prevailed at the Emmys against the other nominees A Radical Life (Discovery+), Apart (PBS), Not Going Quietly (PBS) and Watergate: High Crimes In The White House (CBS) and won the award.