Summary from Avatar Films

Shot on the border of Iran and Afghanistan, Kandahar is a politically urgent story of a young female journalist named Nafas who escaped Afghanistan with her family but must return and race against time in an attempt to rescue her sister. The sister, maimed by an exploded landmine and distraught over the constant persecution simply for being a woman, has written to Nafas vowing that she will commit suicide by the next solar eclipse. Nafas must disguise herself as an Afghan wife by wearing the traditional head-to-toe covering of the burka in order to find her sister in the Taliban-controlled city of Kandahar.

The film is inspired by the real-life experience of actress Nelofer Pazira, who plays Nafas. In 1989, she fled her homeland of Afghanistan and later received a similar letter not from a sister, but from a long-time friend who wanted to end her life.