The city and its people through the director's lens

Beach Kahani, Garr Garr, Azmaan, These Birds Walk and Masters Of The Sky took the audience on an emotional ride.

KARACHI:

Oppressed society, birds, the law and order situation and Lyari dominated the second panel discussion at the Karachi conference on Sunday evening.

After watching short films and documentaries which tried to explain the city, panelists wanted to discuss the negative and positive aspects of living in Karachi.

According to Dr Framji Minwalla, from the Institute of Business Administration's liberal arts department, the eight minute 46 second movie titled Masters of The Sky by Seraj Salikin based on the culture of 'Kabootar baazi' on Jamshed Road could have been a little longer.



Minwalla explained that the residents of Jamshed Town had devoted their lives to this game - pigeon racing or as it is locally known, kabootar baazi. "I have seen people from the age of 16 to 68 spending their lives engrossed in this game," he said. "This sort of cultural sport should be promoted on an international level."

Zeeshan Haider, the creative head of Ezzy Productions and a Szabist faculty member said that the movie had successfully depicted a very interesting sub-culture of Karachi.

While speaking about the short film Beach Kahani, researcher Nazish Brohi, raised a question on why the director made a movie about the beach. She claimed that a girl going out alone could be a victim of sexism anywhere. "If you eliminate sea, the issue remains the same," she said. "General public places have no limit."

Brohi maintained that sometimes even men felt hesitant to take their sisters, mothers or wives to public places.

Talking about Azmaan by Ahsan Shah, which depicted the impact of the deteriorating law and order situation in Lyari, Haider claimed that there was too much music in the film and it distracted the audience from the visuals.

Shah responded to Haider's criticism by stating that violence - the sound of gunshots and daily murders were wreaking havoc with Lyari's children.



"I hold the state and media responsible for not highlighting the issue," said Shah. Brohi agreed with Shah's claim that children in Lyari found it difficult to sleep at night due to flashbacks of firings and killings.

"If you go to a pharmacy in Lyari and ask them how many sleeping pills were being sold on an average, you'll understand the narrative of the film," said Brohi.

Imran Saqib's film, Garr Garr, was based on a quote from Flantz Fanon, 'Oppressed societies are caught by the disease of nonsense talking.' Haider loved the way the film was made and the way the subject was treated. For Brohi, the film had a very strong inception. She thought that the movie would go in some other direction as 'the template of the movie has been overplayed.'

These Birds Walk by Bassam Tariq and Omar Mullick was a tear jerker due to its heart-wrenching content - runaway children. The documentary was based on young boys who had run away from home and usually end up at the Edhi Centre from where they are handed back to their parents. There were different stories of many children who claimed that they did not want to go back home out of fear that their parents would beat them up.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 24^th, 2014.