A woman sews on rich red cloth. She is stringing beads in a scrolling pattern with a deft yet delicate hand. Her name is Jamila. She lives in Afghanistan.

As you watch her sewing, you notice fingers missing. As she pushes up her sleeve, you see her arm is horribly scarred.

Her marriage was arranged when she was 6, she says, and she was married at 11. From the start, her in-laws beat her. One day, her father-in-law emptied a fuel container on her and lit matches.

“My body started burning,” she says. “My daughter was watching and screaming.”

Her husband just laughed. Over 60 percent of her body was burned. Her family told the hospital, “She burned herself.”

Her husband agreed to a divorce only if she gave him their daughter. She did. “They’ll be cruel to her, too,” she says. She desperately wants her daughter but she says, “I have no one.”

Just then, Farzana Wahidy, who has been listening to Jamila’s story, raises her camera to her eye. Click.

The screen goes dark.

“I want to use photography in a way to not be voiceless,” says Wahidy in the interview that follows.

This is one of many compelling scenes in a documentary called “Frame by Frame.” The film was made by two women — Alexandria Bombach and Mo Scarpelli — who had gone to Kabul for two weeks in 2012 to make a short film about Afghan photographers. They then launched a kickstarter campaign and raised over $70,000 to make a longer film, featuring four Afghan photojournalists.

We watched the film last Thursday at the Guilderland Public Library. A few weeks before, 500 people watched a film, “Screenagers,” on teens’ use and sometimes abuse of electronic devices. Only 10 people showed up for “Frame by Frame” but what we learned is worth sharing.

After terrorists attacked our country on Sept. 11, 2001, the United States invaded Afghanistan. And, while we’re certainly aware of the sacrifices made by our soldiers there, how many of us think about the effects of the decades of war on Afghans?

As the movie tells us, taking a photograph was a crime under the Taliban. After the regime fell in 2001, a fledgling free press emerged. As outside troops and media withdraw, the photojournalists featured in “Frame by Frame” are among those providing the pictures of Afghanistan the rest of the world sees.

Wahidy told the filmmakers that the Taliban took away her education. She also tells them the story of being 13 years old and walking beside her mother when a man she didn’t know beat her on the street because she wasn’t fully covered. “I will never forget that … Like me, so many were beaten in the street … to be beaten for no reason by someone that has nothing to do with you ….”

She is now telling the story of what women suffer through her pictures. It is not an easy job. In one scene, Wahidy tries to get into a hospital in Herat to meet and document wounded women but is denied. The mullah in Herat has 6,000 men, she is told by a doctor denying her permission to talk to the women patients. “For him to kill me, beat a few journalists is an easy job,” he says.

Wahidy responds that it is her job to cover the news. “You can write news but it should be news about men,” he tells her.

“They’re making decisions for these women,” Wahidy concludes.

She is married to another young photojournalist, Massoud Hossaini. “Suddenly, with one picture, you become famous,” he says.

Hossaini is talking about his picture of the “girl in green.” She is standing, spattered with blood. All around her lie bodies — bodies of women, of children, of a baby. The girl in green is screaming, her hands at her side, fingers splayed wide.

Hossaini won a Pulitzer Prize, in breaking news photography, for what the judges described as “his heartbreaking image of a girl crying in fear after a suicide bomber’s attack at a crowded shrine in Kabul.”

He was covering an Ashura commemoration when suddenly there was a big explosion. “I had to decide to stay or run away,” he tells the filmmakers.

“I had to go on. Trying to keep myself strong, I took that picture … It was not easy but I had to do it. That was my responsibility.”

Later in the documentary, he sits with Tarana Akbari, the girl in green, and her family. They look solemn, leaning against the wall. Hossaini holds the hand of a shy girl who was hurt during the bombing.

“A photo expresses the reality of society,” says Najibullah Musafar. He is an old man, an artist, a photographer, and a teacher of photography. “The weapon of a photojournalist is their camera,” he tells his students.

He also tells them, “Photojournalism lights up the dark corners of the world.”

In addition to sharing his philosophy, he teaches his students the practical application of their art. “Before you press the shutter, think about depth of field, the rule of one-third,” he says.

In another lesson, he shows them the importance of silhouette and light. He points to a photograph that shows the shadows of soldiers — “the shape a soldier makes when stamping his feet.”

“You should always keep the ‘sense of moment’ in mind,” says Musafar. He says, too, that it takes empathy to enlighten society. “If a photojournalist does not have empathy,” says Musafar, “his photographs will be meaningless.”

Showing film he took of the Taliban committing genocide as they left, Musafar says, “My heart was crying but I had no tears left to cry.”

In addition to the persistence Wahidy has in pursuing hidden stories about women or the courage Hossaini shows in staying at the scene of an explosion to record its aftermath, sometimes a journalist’s job is to make plain what everyone else passes by.

“There are things that we pass by every day with our eyes closed,” says Wakil Kohsar to the filmmakers. He takes picture of subjects that he says he feels deeply about in his heart.

He is shown squatting under a bridge with garbage strewn as far as the eye can see. He is taking a picture of a man doing drugs. “I am certain that a photo can lead to change,” Koshar says.

“This is my life but death is better,” says one of the drug addicts he is filming. “I’m hooked.”

“In every family there is one person who is addicted,” says Kohsar.

He was born during the war and his family became refugees. “I have no good memories from Pakistan,” he says.

He returned to his birthplace, his home, once the Russians withdrew. Then the Taliban came.

“Afghanistan is a graveyard of stories,” Kohsar says.

He is one of the journalists resurrecting those stories, bringing them to life for others to see. We need to pay attention.

Such work is dangerous. The film is dedicated to a journalist at the Agence France-Presse office in Kabul who was murdered. Hossaini worked in that office when he took his Pulitzer Prize-winning photo and Koshar works there now.

We just went to the AFP website and read the top story, about Afghan’s “Hill of Widows,” complete with pictures and video that tell how, after four decades of war, the United Nations estimates there are two million widows in Afghanistan, many of them destitute, their husbands killed. They are often spurned but a community of widows on a stony slope outside Kabul, first settled in the 1990s, takes them in.

We can read stories and see pictures like this if we seek them out, if we look beyond our own safe and familiar lives to embrace a larger world.

In “Frame by Frame,” Hossaini opined that there is “a big possibility that the world will forget Afghanistan again.”

Let us see that doesn’t happen. Photojournalists in Afghanistan are taking real risks every day to tell their country’s stories. The least we can do is look.