Must-See Movie Review: Rule Breakers, Inspiring Story Of All Girl Afghan Robotics Team

February 22, 2025 Jennifer Taylor 0 American Culture, Arts, arts and culture, Babies and Kids, Business, Charity, Civil Rights, Education, Equality, History, Media and Communication, Morality and Ethics, Movie Reviews, Staten Islander Exclusive

Must-See Movie Review: Rule Breakers, Inspiring Story Of All Girl Afghan Robotics Team

Angel Studios has produced several movies that we’ve reviewed, including Cabrini and Bonhoeffer.

Rule Breakers is the true story of the Afghan girls robotics team, called the Afghan Dreamers. This is a truly unique and inspiring story. We meet Roya, the future formative force behind the team, as a little girl in Afghanistan. Her father reminds her that there will be computers in class today, to which she reminds him that the girls won’t be allowed to use them. He tells her to tell the teacher she wants to use them. But she is right, and all of the girls are told to leave the room while the boys use the computers. As a girl who grew up in America, I can only imagine what that must have felt like.

But Roya is a fighter, and she has a fierce and independent spirit. She believes, and shares this belief with one of the fathers later in the film, that it is only when men like him start to stand up for women and girls that anything will change.

Bearing in mind that this movie’s story ended before 2021, it is an inspirational story from the past. For now, women and girls in Afghanistan are not allowed to go to school past 6th grade, and for the most part they can’t leave their homes without a male companion or work. They have been barred from all fields of work including nursing and midwifery through banning the few schools that were providing this training. Considering that many female patients cannot have a male doctor, some have asked how women will give birth safely now.

Roya herself, in the movie, learns to use computers at a local store in Afghanistan where she teaches the patron how to use it as well. Then he can charge customers to use it. This is where she started learning about computers and how they can change people’s lives for the better.

She also formed classes at the local schools where girls could learn math and science. This is how she drew the attention of Afghanistan groups to her activities. As someone who has grown up in the US, where computers have been ubiquitous since our childhood, it is interesting to see how they evolved in Afghanistan.

When Roya has the idea to form a girls robotics team in order to enter a competition in Washington, there are many complications. When the movie starts, we’re shown a scene after she started teaching classes on math and robotics to girls in Afghanistan. Roya, her brother Alireza (who will later become the mentor for the girls team), and another relative are driving in their car when they are passed by a truck. The truck has an AK-47 being held out the window by the passenger, who attempts to shoot them.

When this happened, it seemed almost certain that one of them would be killed. But, miraculously, the shooter’s gun jammed after just a couple of shots, and the truck sped away. While their lives were spared, this was not a secret event. Everyone in their town knew that it had happened, and this would make it even more difficult to get together a girls robotics team.

Getting the girls together to take the skills test was simple. Hundreds of girls showed up to take it. Convincing their traditional families that it is important for their daughters to train for and then travel to the competition so that they could go to college and have a better life where they too could have the opportunities that education brings- in a culture where girls education was not valued – was quite a challenge.

But if there’s one thing to learn about Roya, it’s that she is persistent. She asks them, she talks to them, again and again. Eventually she is able to convince four families to allow their girls to participate and travel to Washington.

They have only a few months to prepare, and one of their challenges is getting the robot kit- which the customs agent believes is likely a bomb. While waiting and trying again and again to get him to release it, they build other robots and practice steering them and making them go straight and navigate obstacles. All the while the contest robot kit is held for weeks until a friend of Roya, who has a relative in customs, is able to convince the person to release it. He is now out of an X-Box and a laptop, but the girls finally have their robot to build.

The next hurdle they face involves obtaining visas for the girls. They need them in order to travel to the US for the week long competition. But they were denied. The State Department held firm until the story became front page headlines, which detailed how the girls would have to watch via Skype as their robot competed in Washington. They were finally able to get them because of the intervention of President Trump at the time (2017). Within about two weeks of the media coverage, he was able to put them in a special program that allowed their visas to be issued.

In another setback, when they arrive at the airport with visas waiting for them at their stopover destination that will take them to Washington, there are only 2 seats left, not 6. Quick thinking by their coach and kindness on the part of other passengers helped them pass through this hurdle on their real life obstacle course to the competition.

After finally arriving and participating, they are awarded a new medal that the organizers created for them- a fourth medal, the silver medal. After this win, the girls don’t want to stop. They enter contest after contest.

The movie climaxes with the major competition they’ve entered whose goal is to make a robot that solved a large real world problem. Unfortunately, their robot arrives half an hour before the competition starts- in pieces and with the arms (the most critical piece) bent hopelessly out of shape. Roya and the girl whose father owned a mechanic shop (who taught her to weld and who had been killed in a bombing just weeks before) rush by taxi to the closest mechanic shop. They’re able to convince the owner to let them use the welder, and they get to the contest just in time.

In the movie, their robot could find land mines, which are still a problem all over the world. People are injured and killed to this day by forgotten mines. Their robot helps detect and mark the places where they are suspected to be.

In real life, they won several gold medal championships before inventing this robot. But in the movie, this was a gold medal, and how their friends and families rejoiced back in Afghanistan!

As far as the film itself, it was amazing. The cinematography was excellent, and it was very emotionally moving. I was constantly reminded of how different it would be to grow up and live in a place where women and girls are not allowed to contribute to the society in meaningful ways. The current state of affairs there is far worse than it was during the time period depicted in this film. At that time, girls were allowed to go to school past 6th grade and women were allowed to be employed in meaningful work and to leave their homes. It has become much worse, and most of the members of the team were able to evacuate the country before everything changed. There is hope, though, as even some of their government officials have been pushing back recently.