There’s a calmness and clarity to this engaging animation, exec-produced by Angelina Jolie, and directed by the Irish film-maker Nora Twomey, co-director of The Secret of Kells, which – like this – earned her an Oscar nomination for best animated picture. It is based on the YA novel by Deborah Ellis. Saara Chaudry voices Parvana, a young girl in Kabul, Afghanistan, which after the Soviet war is under the brutal and woman-hating control of the Taliban. When Parvana’s free-thinking schoolteacher dad Nurullah (Ali Badshah) is imprisoned for the equivalent of thought crime, there are no working-age men left in Parvana’s family: just a mum, an older sister and a baby brother. So Parvana cuts her hair, pretends to be a boy and earns money by selling things in the market and offering to read and write letters (the activity to which her father had been reduced, before being taken away). Parvana feels the sting of oppression and fear, but also a strange freedom, a gratification that her innate intelligence and talent is being put to use, through a strange twist of fate. She also entertains her family in the evenings with her storytelling skills. It’s a film with a charm in the simplicity of its animated style; I particularly liked the hulking, lumbering menfolk of a certain age – almost a different species from the children.