Fixer and local producer in Nuristan

Nuristan is one of the hardest places in Afghanistan for an outsider to work in. The valleys are a day or two from Kabul on roads that flood, the languages are spoken nowhere else, permission has to be carried from the ministry in Kabul to the culture director in each province, and a stranger with a camera is a stranger until someone the village trusts says otherwise. We are that someone. Our team lives in the province, speaks its languages and Dari and Pashto, and has spent years taking visitors, buyers and relatives into the valleys and out again.

This page is for journalists, documentary producers, photographers, researchers and organisations who need to work in Nuristan or neighbouring Kunar and want a local partner who can get the permissions, open the doors, translate, drive, house, feed and brief them, and keep them out of trouble. It sets out what we arrange, how permission works now, what we will not do, how we charge, and the stories the province holds. If you only need research done without travelling, that is on this page too.

Working as a foreign journalist in Afghanistan now runs through a defined process, and it is slower than it looks. A journalist's visa comes from an Afghan mission abroad, in Istanbul, Islamabad or Dubai among others; the tourist e-visa launched in March 2026 is for tourists and does not cover reporting. In Kabul the Foreign Ministry's media office vets a visitor's past work and social media, which has taken about a day in published accounts, and the Ministry of Information and Culture then issues a letter and, since 2024, registers journalists in a database and issues identity cards. Each province visited requires a further permission from its own Information and Culture director. Nuristan's is in Parun.

The rules have tightened. In September 2024 the ministry imposed pre-recording and approved-guest rules on broadcasters; some provinces have banned filming people in public; and the Committee to Protect Journalists has documented foreign and Afghan media workers detained by the intelligence service, including an American filmmaker and his Afghan producer in Kabul in 2022. The United Nations has counted more than 250 detentions of journalists since 2021. None of that stops serious work being done in Nuristan; it means the permissions must be real, the subjects agreed in advance, and the local partner someone the officials already know.

What we do is the provincial end of that chain and the valley end of everything else. We will tell you before you travel what we expect to be permitted, lodge the provincial request with your Kabul letter, meet you at the Kunar line, and stay with you. What we will not do is film what has been forbidden, pay anyone to look away, or put a villager in front of a camera who has not agreed to be there.