A Pakistani filmmaker, Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy, for the first time ever in the history of Pakistan has won an Oscar Award. She won it for her documentary ‘Saving Face’ which tells the story of two women whose faces had been burnt by the acid-throwers and then rehabilitated by a doctor. The documentary features Marvi Memon as well who was the chief proponent of getting “The Acid Control and Acid Crime Prevention Bill 2010” approved.
As a Pakistani, I take the Oscar achievement as a matter of pride. The voice for the Pakistani women raised by Marvi Memon, Shehnaz Sheikh and Anushay Rahman has finally been resonated in the halls of fame. The days are now sure to come when women in Pakistan shall also be feeling safe and equally respected as are the opposite gender counterparts.
As a media student, I have some reservations, rather, questions regarding the nomination and winning the award eventually. For example; why the Oscar guys picked only Sharmeen’s work especially when almost all media-literate individuals (home and abroad) know that the fifth filter of the Herman-Chomsky Propaganda Model has been replaced from Anti-Communism to Ideology ie, Islam.
In simple words, you cannot produce or air the media content (leave aside the matter of winning any award) unless it successfully passes through certain filters put by the ruling class of the capitalist society; the US in this case.
A simple question: would Sharmeen still have won the Oscar if she had made a documentary on the miseries of the lamenting Afghan/Pakistani women whose babies were heartlessly killed by the blind air-strikes/drone-attacks by the US?
The answer is obviously a resounding NO.
This means, in order to win the Oscar, or even become visible on the horizons of the western media, you will have to make movies like Terror’s Children, Afghanistan: Lifting the Veil, Reinventing the Taliban and Women of the Holy Kingdom. It would be interesting to note that the above-mentioned movies have been made by Sharmeen; and most of them are available on YouTube. If you happen to watch them, you will come to the conclusion that the content of the movies is exactly what the US and the western powers want; showing Saudi Arabia a country of contradictions and Afghanistan a country of the suppressed veiled creature they call women. And, in the garb of freedom and democracy the US would love to liberate these societies from the oppressors. Of course, there is no intention of taking the oil resources of the countries in their possession. They (angels and saviours) just would come, liberate the women from the ‘beasts’, and go back to their lands without getting any benefit from the soils of the ‘oppressors’.
This award, for a media student, leaves some more questions to ponder over.
1. Why hasn’t any Indian won such an award where female infanticide is a social norm?
2. Doesn’t the timing of the award hint towards the foreign policy (Afghan policy) of the US? Isn’t the US ‘saving face’ in order to get an honourable exit?
3. What kind of stuff would most of the Pakistanis produce after getting the inspiration from the award?
4. Who would monitor the producers of such propaganda-stained material?
5. Who shall dare make movies on the politically-tabooed topics?
6. Academically, a documentary is said to be a poor one if it has too many talking-heads in it. I am amazed; what was good in the movie technically, when we know that such standards of quality have been set by the very western society?
AHMAD HAMMAD
Lahore