Pakistani documentary on female education bags second nomination

KARACHI:

What a time to be a documentary film-maker in Pakistan. While the feature film industry still hasn’t fully captured the attention of foreign markets, documentaries on social issues have made it to the most prestigious film award show — courtesy Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy and Co.

Shehzad Hameed is another such Pakistani who has made it his life’s mission to highlight the plight of the underprivileged through film. His latest documentary, Flight of the Falcons, revolves around the struggle women encounter while exercising their right to education in Pakistan.

The film has already managed to bag two nominations. Towards the end of last year, it was nominated for the Asia-Pacific Childs Right Awards and most recently for the Best Documentary Award Community Portraits at the New York Festival. However, what’s most satisfying for Hameed is the fact that he has contributed towards the discourse of female education in his country.





“The documentary received the attention from the Malala Fund who ran an article on Punjab’s Zephanian Free Education Centre [shown in the film] and that helped gather support for the one-room school. Also, some Americans are now teaching at the school via Skype pro-bono so that was great to hear,” Hameed told The Express Tribune. He said the school has also now managed to gather funds to build a roof and buy computers for the girls.

Recalling the personal motivations that drove him towards the project, Hameed said “Pakistan has the second largest population of out-of-school children in the world and almost 5.3 million kids don’t even make it to 5th grade.”

While he holds his intentions are noble, his detractors and critics would be quick to state how the subject has become a clichéd theme with our documentary film-makers. Hameed holds that the issue is of prime importance and it is imperative that attention is drawn towards it. “Having grown up in a patriarchal society I have always enjoyed certain advantages that girls do not have. This is realised only when I moved to the US a few years back,” he said.

It when then that Hameed realised the importance of empowering the girl child through education.

His time in the US not only broadened his worldview but also coincided with the incident of Malala Yousafzai being shot by the Taliban; he soon decided to pick up his camera and make a documentary to better represent the issues hampering girls’ education in the country.

Flight of the Falcons also sheds light on some of the other threats such as corporal punishment and the harassment our women encounter in public spaces.

The documentarian believes that it is these two aspects that give his film a slight edge over other similar projects. “These two angles have never been discussed in any documentary I know of.  So I feel it is a little different,” he added.

Making a documentary on such a subject is no easy feat in a country such as Pakistan. Through the course of filming, Hameed was required to travel to rural areas and implemented a fly-on-the-wall approach where he shadowed his subjects to be able to film them during their daily routine.

For Hameed, one of the most difficult aspects about putting the film together was to not make the children feel intimated by his presence. “I was filming with kids and girls to be precise, and they were very aware of my presence in their surroundings in the initial days. Some simply refused to speak to me since I was the first ‘outside man’ they were interacting with,” he said.

Published in The Express Tribune, March 2^nd, 2016.

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