Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy
Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy
Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoyis a Pakistani journalist, filmmaker and activist. She has won two Academy Awards for the documentaries Saving Face and A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness, that made her the First Pakistani Director to win two Academy Awards and one of only eleven female directors to win the award for a non-fiction film. In 2012, the Government of Pakistan awarded her with the Hilal-e-Imtiaz, the second highest civilian honour of the country. Time named her in its...
NationalityPakistani
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth12 November 1978
CountryPakistan
I'm generally quite an angry person, and I like to channel my anger toward something creative.
But the biggest challenge overall was narrowing down the complex narrative elements into a clean and straightforward story while maintaining a sense of the cultural context that makes the film special.
All the women in Pakistan working for change, don't give up on your dreams, this is for you
Don't give up your dreams.
Education liberates a woman.
I grew up listening to my grandfather's stories of our musical past. He would often talk about the orchestras that played at concerts and the musicians who played on Sunday evenings on street corners. By the time I grew up in the '80s, all of this was a thing of the past. I lived vicariously through his stories and often wondered what it would have felt like to have been part of his generation.
It takes one second to ruin a woman's life.
I don't think I'll be making documentaries my whole life.
I believe in telling the truth.
As filmmakers, you're not working on just one project, you're producing something, directing something, shooting something, and so it becomes hard to do it by yourself.
In terms of 'Saving Face,' I was inspired by the stories of survivors who didn't let their attacks stop them from pursuing justice and seeking treatment.
The Pakistani government and its allies must overhaul their policies in Pakistan.
By bringing the voices of the ordinary people faced with extraordinary challenges to television screens around the world, I hope to affect change in one community at a time.
My advice to other female directors would be to pay no heed to naysayers. Women can be united in the fact that there has always been someone in our lives who has told us "it can't be done" or "there is only so much you can do." We are constantly encouraged to think that being born a woman means we were born with limited choices and compromised dreams.