An Oscar for honour

Many, perhaps the majority, of filmmakers go through their entire careers without winning an Academy Award, nor even getting nominated for one. Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy has now distinguished herself and Pakistan by winning a second Oscar, this time for her documentary A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness. Her first Oscar in 2012 was for Saving Face, a film about the survivors of acid attacks and her second is no less challenging as a subject — honour killing. The film had already caught the attention of Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif who had requested a private screening and promised afterwards to amend legislation in an attempt to counter this pernicious and repulsive cultural evil. “There is no honour in honour killing,” said the prime minister after viewing the film, and Ms Obaid-Chinoy herself said that whilst she appreciated the prime minister’s support, unless there are prosecutions for honour killing there will be no discouragement of it.

In her acceptance speech Ms Obaid-Chinoy thanked a range of people who had made the Oscar possible, including those “strong women” who stood against the practice, but a hard road lies ahead. Despite the honour of an Oscar bestowed on a talented and resourceful figure and the support of the most powerful in the land, honour killings are not going away any time soon. Those who kill in the name of ‘honour’ are not going to be influenced by an award made far from the parameters that define their socio-cultural imperatives. The Oscar will briefly make local and international headlines but the film itself is unlikely to get a screening by any of the mainstream TV channels and it would need dubbing or subtitling into Urdu anyway to have any impact. There must be doubt as to whether it will be shown widely in colleges and universities, and there will be those who roundly condemn it for ‘showing Pakistan in a bad light’. It is even less likely to get an airing anywhere inside the public primary education system. Honour killing is murder with a sanitised label, and Ms Obaid-Chinoy’s film says that plainly — an important step. A bigger step would be to ensure that millions watch it, in their first language.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 1^st, 2016.

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