Noorilhuda's Blog - Posts Tagged "media"
CULTURAL INACCURACIES IN 'DUKHTAR' - Pakistan's official entry for Oscars 2015:
Pakistan is a kaleidoscope of such a colorful and morbid reality that I have often thought an exercise in fiction about this country is a useless exercise - after all, the daily news is strange enough to make a good dramatic story.
This is primarily the reason ‘Dukhtar’, Pakistan’s official entry for Oscars 2015, is a letdown. Made by a Pakistani with the sensibilities of a foreigner, the script is barren and characters as cardboard in the end as they were in the first scene that introduced them. On paper, making a film about the menace of child marriage and female barter ship to settle scores and make peace between vengeful tribes seems like a winning idea, especially if you are aiming for international awards and festivals. Heck, even the idea of a woman wanting more out of her life is great. However, from the get-go you feel like you are watching a bunch of actors thrown about to ‘fit’ a narrative that is as far-fetched as a Punjabi film. What makes it worse is that you do not feel any empathy or sense of danger for the leads.
Afia Nathaniel’s first shot is of a dreaming mother visualizing a life out in the open - an idea that remains unexplored for the whole film. Since the film fails to explain where it takes place, you are left to make assumptions based on the dialects and looks of the leads and the location of shoot. It seems like Samiya Mumtaz is an urdu-speaking Punjabi married off to a Pashtun tribal warlord as a 15-year old and now has a ten-year old daughter with him. How did that happen would have made for a far more entertaining story. If she is supposed to play a Pathan or Hunzai, she could have atleast worked on her accent. It’s almost like a white man playing a black one and as much insensitive. For a story that takes place allegedly in Pukhtun and/ or Northern Areas, the lead roles are given to non-Pathan actors who never look a shred beyond what they are: Karachiittes.
As the husband, legendary Asif Khan is grotesquely underused. Samina Ahmed who only shows up in the last reel of the film has more significance than him. Khan is the sole man of his tribe to go blindfolded to neighboring Nuristan (Mullah Fazlullah’s hangout) to talk peace with a warring chieftain who has lost more men to Khan than vice versa. Instead of shooting Khan dead on the spot like any warring chief worth his salt and kalashnikov, the old chieftain propositions marriage to his girl-child. No money, smuggled goods, arms, goats or territories are offered. Just a single girl-child. And viola! there will be singing doves!
Mumtaz, who has made a career out of the single-tone painful expression perennially registered on her face, is the only adult female in her home, in the un-named village, on the road and in subsequent rooftops and cellphone chit chats. It is not till she reaches Lahore that the viewer sees another woman on Planet Pakistan. This is another one of those elements used by foreigners when making films about cultures they don’t have time for nor care to know. When I interviewed Pushto poet Akmal Laywanay in his home in Shamozai, Mardan in 2007 amidst his reservations on a woman entering the ‘mardana’ side of the house, the ‘zanana’ (female section in conservative households) was still full of women and girls from the very old to the very young. There was one ‘modern’ (read ‘Indian’) bathroom in the village and that was in another house down the street. The girls were all uneducated and could only understand Pushto. None of them had access to a man. Right after the Lal Masjid massacre, I spoke to the survivors and their families (living in Rahim Yar Khan, Mansehra, Charsadda and Islamabad) and two things were clear: girls wore burka and had no access to TV, not even PTV and fathers were openly affectionate to daughters they barely saw.
Nathaniel’s world of conservative dangerous households consists of a girl-child going to a school, learning English, with a mother who regularly watches dramas and is alone with untamed relatives! The husband and father, Khan, is shown as cold but in his house, the females are doing alright!
Choices make or break lives and nobody knows it better than a Pakistani woman. Once a bunch of educated brilliant women from Dir working as medical health practitioners (doctor, nurse, LHW) backtracked on a scheduled interview because they feared they would be shot in Peshawar during recording of the program - not by their families but by extremists! And remember the Kohistan video scandal where the mere videotaping of clapping girls was enough to ensure their death as well as that of the four brothers - two of whom were dancing in the video? The case that led Supreme Court to pass orders that no girl will be killed and Farzana Bari to eulogize to uninterested locals that ‘these are your women, you have to protect them’? The net result was the alleged throwing of all girls in the river and murder of the video-makers. This is the reality of going against tradition.
Hence, it is inexplicable how Nathaniel envisaged a woman in bright clothes could scurry through an entire narrow pathway without being seen by a single man or child, manage to get hold of a truck driver, sit next to him on the front seat, moonlight with him for days, never have a discussion with her daughter about why they ran, never show any kind of urgency of the danger they are in or interest in the fact that they will be killed, and yet still be surprised when she is caught, accused of having a lover and about to be shot dead! Anjuman gyrating in the fields of Punjab does not look so far-fetched anymore.
Another aspect in which the film fails women is the manner in which the mother endangers the life of her own child time and time again and how a stranger, a truck driver, comes to their rescue again and again. Why he does so in the first place is never explained. In the funniest scene of the entire film, he actually abandons his truck for a woman he barely knows! It’s almost like the coal miners leaving the donkey that their lives depend on. As all the drivers of burning NATO containers will tell you - no truck is ever left behind. He is also the first trucker who has forgotten his slang, expletives, loud music, opium, nose picking, rubbing his shalwar and general horniness - or maybe he is hiding it all under his well-blow-dried hair. I half-expected him to break into a ‘luddi’ dance (folk dance) on the rooftop he romances Mumtaz.
And last but not least, the clumsy half-baked death threat of Ajab Gul’s wannabe paramour in the end, where he resists shooting the woman he has been hunting for days is so incredibly juvenile that it bares disbelief. In 1999, Samia Sarwar was shot dead by the man her own mother brought along to her lawyer’s office. Little has changed since then. Every other day a ticker passes by on TV screens telling how some father has swiftly gotten rid of his ‘wayward’ daughter. Lesson: nobody thinks twice before shooting a woman.
To top it all of, the idea that Lahore is a safe haven for them is childish. Just four months ago, a pregnant woman was bludgeoned to death amongst spectators and police outside Lahore High Court. Her name was Farzana Parveen. No place is safe for such women. But then a neat bow could not be tied over the parceled film, could it?
The three things that Nathaniel gets right in the film are the truck, the cinematography and the girl-child (played in vivacious intelligent strokes by Saleha Arif stealing every scene she is in).
It’s great that indigenous subjects are being taken up for filmmaking. Pakistan is our country - bloodied, bruised, ignorant, emotional, frustrated - with an incredible richness of mood, thought and expression - forever gliding between what could be and what is. Let’s not put it in a sanitized box.
This is primarily the reason ‘Dukhtar’, Pakistan’s official entry for Oscars 2015, is a letdown. Made by a Pakistani with the sensibilities of a foreigner, the script is barren and characters as cardboard in the end as they were in the first scene that introduced them. On paper, making a film about the menace of child marriage and female barter ship to settle scores and make peace between vengeful tribes seems like a winning idea, especially if you are aiming for international awards and festivals. Heck, even the idea of a woman wanting more out of her life is great. However, from the get-go you feel like you are watching a bunch of actors thrown about to ‘fit’ a narrative that is as far-fetched as a Punjabi film. What makes it worse is that you do not feel any empathy or sense of danger for the leads.
Afia Nathaniel’s first shot is of a dreaming mother visualizing a life out in the open - an idea that remains unexplored for the whole film. Since the film fails to explain where it takes place, you are left to make assumptions based on the dialects and looks of the leads and the location of shoot. It seems like Samiya Mumtaz is an urdu-speaking Punjabi married off to a Pashtun tribal warlord as a 15-year old and now has a ten-year old daughter with him. How did that happen would have made for a far more entertaining story. If she is supposed to play a Pathan or Hunzai, she could have atleast worked on her accent. It’s almost like a white man playing a black one and as much insensitive. For a story that takes place allegedly in Pukhtun and/ or Northern Areas, the lead roles are given to non-Pathan actors who never look a shred beyond what they are: Karachiittes.
As the husband, legendary Asif Khan is grotesquely underused. Samina Ahmed who only shows up in the last reel of the film has more significance than him. Khan is the sole man of his tribe to go blindfolded to neighboring Nuristan (Mullah Fazlullah’s hangout) to talk peace with a warring chieftain who has lost more men to Khan than vice versa. Instead of shooting Khan dead on the spot like any warring chief worth his salt and kalashnikov, the old chieftain propositions marriage to his girl-child. No money, smuggled goods, arms, goats or territories are offered. Just a single girl-child. And viola! there will be singing doves!
Mumtaz, who has made a career out of the single-tone painful expression perennially registered on her face, is the only adult female in her home, in the un-named village, on the road and in subsequent rooftops and cellphone chit chats. It is not till she reaches Lahore that the viewer sees another woman on Planet Pakistan. This is another one of those elements used by foreigners when making films about cultures they don’t have time for nor care to know. When I interviewed Pushto poet Akmal Laywanay in his home in Shamozai, Mardan in 2007 amidst his reservations on a woman entering the ‘mardana’ side of the house, the ‘zanana’ (female section in conservative households) was still full of women and girls from the very old to the very young. There was one ‘modern’ (read ‘Indian’) bathroom in the village and that was in another house down the street. The girls were all uneducated and could only understand Pushto. None of them had access to a man. Right after the Lal Masjid massacre, I spoke to the survivors and their families (living in Rahim Yar Khan, Mansehra, Charsadda and Islamabad) and two things were clear: girls wore burka and had no access to TV, not even PTV and fathers were openly affectionate to daughters they barely saw.
Nathaniel’s world of conservative dangerous households consists of a girl-child going to a school, learning English, with a mother who regularly watches dramas and is alone with untamed relatives! The husband and father, Khan, is shown as cold but in his house, the females are doing alright!
Choices make or break lives and nobody knows it better than a Pakistani woman. Once a bunch of educated brilliant women from Dir working as medical health practitioners (doctor, nurse, LHW) backtracked on a scheduled interview because they feared they would be shot in Peshawar during recording of the program - not by their families but by extremists! And remember the Kohistan video scandal where the mere videotaping of clapping girls was enough to ensure their death as well as that of the four brothers - two of whom were dancing in the video? The case that led Supreme Court to pass orders that no girl will be killed and Farzana Bari to eulogize to uninterested locals that ‘these are your women, you have to protect them’? The net result was the alleged throwing of all girls in the river and murder of the video-makers. This is the reality of going against tradition.
Hence, it is inexplicable how Nathaniel envisaged a woman in bright clothes could scurry through an entire narrow pathway without being seen by a single man or child, manage to get hold of a truck driver, sit next to him on the front seat, moonlight with him for days, never have a discussion with her daughter about why they ran, never show any kind of urgency of the danger they are in or interest in the fact that they will be killed, and yet still be surprised when she is caught, accused of having a lover and about to be shot dead! Anjuman gyrating in the fields of Punjab does not look so far-fetched anymore.
Another aspect in which the film fails women is the manner in which the mother endangers the life of her own child time and time again and how a stranger, a truck driver, comes to their rescue again and again. Why he does so in the first place is never explained. In the funniest scene of the entire film, he actually abandons his truck for a woman he barely knows! It’s almost like the coal miners leaving the donkey that their lives depend on. As all the drivers of burning NATO containers will tell you - no truck is ever left behind. He is also the first trucker who has forgotten his slang, expletives, loud music, opium, nose picking, rubbing his shalwar and general horniness - or maybe he is hiding it all under his well-blow-dried hair. I half-expected him to break into a ‘luddi’ dance (folk dance) on the rooftop he romances Mumtaz.
And last but not least, the clumsy half-baked death threat of Ajab Gul’s wannabe paramour in the end, where he resists shooting the woman he has been hunting for days is so incredibly juvenile that it bares disbelief. In 1999, Samia Sarwar was shot dead by the man her own mother brought along to her lawyer’s office. Little has changed since then. Every other day a ticker passes by on TV screens telling how some father has swiftly gotten rid of his ‘wayward’ daughter. Lesson: nobody thinks twice before shooting a woman.
To top it all of, the idea that Lahore is a safe haven for them is childish. Just four months ago, a pregnant woman was bludgeoned to death amongst spectators and police outside Lahore High Court. Her name was Farzana Parveen. No place is safe for such women. But then a neat bow could not be tied over the parceled film, could it?
The three things that Nathaniel gets right in the film are the truck, the cinematography and the girl-child (played in vivacious intelligent strokes by Saleha Arif stealing every scene she is in).
It’s great that indigenous subjects are being taken up for filmmaking. Pakistan is our country - bloodied, bruised, ignorant, emotional, frustrated - with an incredible richness of mood, thought and expression - forever gliding between what could be and what is. Let’s not put it in a sanitized box.
MALALA FINALLY WINS!
The youngest ever Nobel Peace Prize winner is from the sixth-most populous country in the world i.e. our very own Pakistan! In a world fast bracing it's self for youngest-ever self-made millionaires and start-up tycoons (and some guy called Zuckerberg), we have done our bit by adding a spirited girl who will be the voice of global social change and access to education for time to come. And with one of the largest youth ‘bulges’ in the world - 35% of pop. is aged 15 or under according to UNICEF and 47% of the 84 million registered voters are aged between 18-35 and we lag behind on every education/ employment paradigm - it will be the right incentive to all young people to aim higher amidst adversity, scorn, suspicion, a few attacks by pissed-off terrorists and colorful zingers by fellow countrymen & women.
It could not have come at a better time either. Yes, last year media created this false sense of euphoria for a win that never materialized and this year, they were all a bit unusually quiet once she had, but make no mistake, Malala has made more than history. She has given a sense of accomplishment to an undeserving country that is hell-bent on making news for bad stuff and embarrassing itself on international stage than for anything constructive. After a year of blanket coverage to Taliban-apologists, political supporters and downright beheading experts from the militias, a land made holy by shaming it’s women than sending them to school, and a people more comforted by the antagonizing words of angry bearded soothsayers than say, a female human rights lawyer by the name of Asma Jehangir, this girl stands proud and it makes me proud as hell to be a Pakistani because of it!
Success in any field is a tricky thing. It involves personal effort, choices and experiences that lead one to succeed in any given profession. That line, ‘some are born great, some achieve greatness and others have greatness thrust upon them’ is true. Mozart was cool from the get-go (composing at age 5!). Imran Khan perfected his game (practice, practice) and Mandela chose the road less traveled by. With Malala, there has been a convergence of factors beyond her control with what she was destined to be all along. She was a bright confident girl from the most backward areas in Pakistan and the hawkishly conservative tribal KPK, who got shot by Enemy of the West and survived an injury that technically should have killed her on the spot if not for heavy loss of blood. She went abroad and was given a platform by countries used to giving platforms to ‘newsworthy’ people for furthering global developmental goals. Her rise to fame (and money) is phenomenal but it is based on character and luck. And she has used that privilege for something good - universal education for all and rights of children. And she has her whole life ahead of her to accomplish the symbol she’s come to represent.
It was this symbol that got Obamas to see her instead of our elected PM on his first visit to U.S. last year! In a capitalistic world where women are objectified, branded and sold on skewed perceptions, where anyone can make easy money off anything (Kardashian sex tape millions, Cyrus on a ball, marrying a Royal or Feudal, Big Brother, committing blasphemy / controversy) and a western sub-culture that gratifies 'famous for being famous' this girl has stayed focussed and dreamt big. Right after the announcement she thanked her father for ‘not clipping my wings’. Well, she needn’t worry. Millions of Pakistanis not used to praise of any sort will gladly do it for her!
Awards are always controversial and subjective. They are a strange mix of uniqueness of work, popularity of an individual and the awarding authority’s need to feel good about it’s self. Oscars became redundant a long time ago but the glamorous sizzle is still there - our own Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy won for documentary film on acid-attack survivors, ‘Saving Face’ in 2013. Ayesha Omar cannot sing to save her life but that has not stopped her from winning a Lux Style Award for Best Female Singer and getting the Cola advert simply on the strength of the hit comedy series she’s a vital part of! Even NPP has been accused of playing favorites, politics or downright racism in choosing winners. Ofcourse Obama did not deserve it nine months into his Presidency and Kissinger certainly absolutely irrevocably did not. But then many recipients of Pride of Performance by GoP did not either.
Five of the last 12 Nobel Peace Prize winners are Muslim. The important thing to gloat over is that one of our own has been felicitated. And she is only 17 which gives Pakistanis plenty of time to grow up to the idea!
Her entire Amanpour interview:
http://edition.cnn.com/video/data/2.0...
And my cover story from 2012, right after the attack on this braveheart’s life :)
http://pique.pk/a-girl-versus-a-militia/
It could not have come at a better time either. Yes, last year media created this false sense of euphoria for a win that never materialized and this year, they were all a bit unusually quiet once she had, but make no mistake, Malala has made more than history. She has given a sense of accomplishment to an undeserving country that is hell-bent on making news for bad stuff and embarrassing itself on international stage than for anything constructive. After a year of blanket coverage to Taliban-apologists, political supporters and downright beheading experts from the militias, a land made holy by shaming it’s women than sending them to school, and a people more comforted by the antagonizing words of angry bearded soothsayers than say, a female human rights lawyer by the name of Asma Jehangir, this girl stands proud and it makes me proud as hell to be a Pakistani because of it!
Success in any field is a tricky thing. It involves personal effort, choices and experiences that lead one to succeed in any given profession. That line, ‘some are born great, some achieve greatness and others have greatness thrust upon them’ is true. Mozart was cool from the get-go (composing at age 5!). Imran Khan perfected his game (practice, practice) and Mandela chose the road less traveled by. With Malala, there has been a convergence of factors beyond her control with what she was destined to be all along. She was a bright confident girl from the most backward areas in Pakistan and the hawkishly conservative tribal KPK, who got shot by Enemy of the West and survived an injury that technically should have killed her on the spot if not for heavy loss of blood. She went abroad and was given a platform by countries used to giving platforms to ‘newsworthy’ people for furthering global developmental goals. Her rise to fame (and money) is phenomenal but it is based on character and luck. And she has used that privilege for something good - universal education for all and rights of children. And she has her whole life ahead of her to accomplish the symbol she’s come to represent.
It was this symbol that got Obamas to see her instead of our elected PM on his first visit to U.S. last year! In a capitalistic world where women are objectified, branded and sold on skewed perceptions, where anyone can make easy money off anything (Kardashian sex tape millions, Cyrus on a ball, marrying a Royal or Feudal, Big Brother, committing blasphemy / controversy) and a western sub-culture that gratifies 'famous for being famous' this girl has stayed focussed and dreamt big. Right after the announcement she thanked her father for ‘not clipping my wings’. Well, she needn’t worry. Millions of Pakistanis not used to praise of any sort will gladly do it for her!
Awards are always controversial and subjective. They are a strange mix of uniqueness of work, popularity of an individual and the awarding authority’s need to feel good about it’s self. Oscars became redundant a long time ago but the glamorous sizzle is still there - our own Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy won for documentary film on acid-attack survivors, ‘Saving Face’ in 2013. Ayesha Omar cannot sing to save her life but that has not stopped her from winning a Lux Style Award for Best Female Singer and getting the Cola advert simply on the strength of the hit comedy series she’s a vital part of! Even NPP has been accused of playing favorites, politics or downright racism in choosing winners. Ofcourse Obama did not deserve it nine months into his Presidency and Kissinger certainly absolutely irrevocably did not. But then many recipients of Pride of Performance by GoP did not either.
Five of the last 12 Nobel Peace Prize winners are Muslim. The important thing to gloat over is that one of our own has been felicitated. And she is only 17 which gives Pakistanis plenty of time to grow up to the idea!
Her entire Amanpour interview:
http://edition.cnn.com/video/data/2.0...
And my cover story from 2012, right after the attack on this braveheart’s life :)
http://pique.pk/a-girl-versus-a-militia/
