Reporter Saira Shah travels undercover into Taliban-controlled Afghanistan with a hidden camera, working with women from the underground network RAWA to document daily life under a regime that has banned women from work, school, and appearing in public without a male relative. The film's most notorious scene, shot secretly at Kabul's football stadium, shows a woman in a blue burka led onto the pitch in front of a crowd and executed for an unspecified crime, footage that became one of the defining images of pre-2001 Afghanistan. Shah also visits hospitals stripped of female staff, girls being taught in secret home classrooms at risk of punishment, and the ruins left by decades of war. Made shortly before the September 11 attacks brought Afghanistan back into Western headlines, the film gives a firsthand account of a society few outsiders had been able to film, built almost entirely from footage smuggled out under threat of discovery.