OSCAR-WINNING PAKISTAN DIRECTOR TACKLES TABOOS
“If a film can galvanise a country into thinking about [the victims], there can be no greater reward for a filmmaker” SHARMEEN OBAID-CHINOY
In eastern Pakistan, a 19-year-old girl was beaten and threatened at gunpoint because she wanted to marry the man she loved. When she stepped out of her home, her uncle caught her, shot her, put her in a bag and dumped her in a river.
This horrific event was an attempted “honour killing,” an old custom that persists in some Muslim and other communities in parts of South Asia and the Middle East. The men who commit the murders are often hailed as heroes for redeeming the honour of the families “disgraced” by marriages or relationships that had not received parental consent.
Filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, 38, featured the girl who survived the attack in her documentary A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness. The 38-minute film immediately sparked heated debate in Pakistan on its release in 2015, which culminated in parliament making “honour killing” a crime punishable by 25 years in prison. The documentary last year won Chinoy her second Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject. She won in the same category in 2012 for Saving Face, about acid attacks on women in Pakistan.
“If a film can galvanise a country into thinking about [the victims], there can be no greater reward for a filmmaker,” she said.
Her films have zoomed in on the creeping radicalism in Muslim societies, whether it be riots by men demanding more fundamentalism or militias that condition children to be suicide bombers.
Her own wake-up call came when she was a teenager in Karachi. While being driven to her elite school, she saw a teenager begging on the street. “This world is not fair,” she told her mother. To which her mother replied, “If you have questions, why don’t you write about it?”
Chinoy heeded those words, writing articles for local newspapers at age 14 and later going to the United States to study journalism. She was there when the 9/11 attacks occurred and the US began bombing Afghanistan because it refused to extradite Osama bin Laden, the founder of al-Qaeda, the militant group that carried out the attacks.
Very few people around her in the US had ever met an Afghan. Feeling that this needed to change, Chinoy put down her pen and picked up a camera. Discussing why she made her first film, Terror’s Children, she said, “Everyone was talking about the war in Afghanistan, but no one was talking about the children and how war had affected them.”
Chinoy began making films about her home country in 2003. When Pakistan turned toward the US after supporting the Taliban in Afghanistan, the opposition became radicalised, threatening national unity. She has attracted considerable criticism for shining a spotlight on her country’s darker side, but Chinoy remains undaunted. “Someone like me, who is travelling [between] two worlds, would be able to perhaps tell that story,” she said.
Chinoy was born in 1978, the year after a military coup shook up society. She grew up amid the rise of a more rigorous form of Islamism. “My parents spoke about the freedoms they enjoyed in dress, concerts, and so on,” she said. “The movie industry was flourishing, cabarets existed. It was a very different lifestyle. On Sundays, bands played in the streets of Karachi.”
Through the nostalgic reminiscences of her parents and grandparents, she learned that her country had once been a peaceful, secular society.
Her film Song of Lahore, released in 2015, features a group of musicians no longer able to perform due to the tightening grip of Islamic rule. Some musicians who played indigenous instruments found their outlet in jazz, a totally foreign art form. After receiving rave reviews online, they were invited to the US to perform. “Pakistanis are artists, not terrorists,” said conductor Nijat Ali.
“I wanted younger generations to connect with an older generation, to understand what they had gone through and to appreciate Pakistan’s rich musical history,” Chinoy said.