The following interview with renowned filmmaker Sabiha Sumar was conducted in May 2013 around the time of release of her latest feature Good Morning Karachi (Image 1). It provides a series of rare insights into the often debilitating challenges that have hindered the development of a world-class cinema in Pakistan. Despite the existence of impressive individual contributions such as her own internationally acclaimed Khamosh Pani (2003) the making of which is described in detail below, independent production in particular has suffered from a lack of recognition and support from state and society. Difficulties begin with pragmatic obstacles—above all coping with the absence of technically skilled practitioners that can be relied upon in the production process, a problem that means every individual project of making a film is simultaneously an exercise in training. More fundamentally, the suspicion among state authorities and at times local communities toward the arts creates a hostile environment in which maintaining high production values and criticality toward official narratives comes at a high price. The presence of international film crews imparting knowledge and expertise that can be used by local crew on present and future productions, instead of being met with warm gratitude as a positive and welcome development, can result in outright paranoia, as the epic story of Khamosh Pani’s making renders clear.
Source: Photograph by Alexander Gonschior, Courtesy Terre De Femme].
In a speculative rumination on the source of these problems, Sumar cites the particular importance of the Zia years, in which society’s subjugation by the state stunted independent thought and creative expression. More fundamentally, she relates the lack of importance attached to the arts to a deeper absence of vision, direction, and confusion around identity within the elite. In doing so, she echoes commentators like Tariq Ali who have contrasted Pakistan to India for its lack of a coherent national identity. Sumar’s testimony amounts to a sobering message about the ideological dysfunctions and structural limitations that have condemned independent filmmakers to operate under extreme difficulty, and even more problematically, as individuals in relative isolation: the cultural situation in Pakistan prevents their work from flourishing collectively as part of cultural projects that can generate and sustain deeper and broader legacies.
Against this backdrop, her personal trajectory as a filmmaker is all the more intriguing. Born to a progressive Bombay-based family with Muslim League sympathies, and presumably, some faith in the idea of Pakistan, her childhood exposure to traditional Indo-Persian literary influences—poetry, music, Sufi philosophy, and storytelling—had a formative impact on her pursuit of the screen as a career. Unlike some filmmakers who opt exclusively for technical training when it comes to education, Sumar’s preference for an intellectual grounding in the liberal arts appears to have prioritized content over form. And yet, her passion for film took root early during an upbringing that recalls a bygone time when visits to the cinema were quite normal among Karachi’s middle classes. In the pleasures of the theatre hall and drive-in, she discovered the power of cinema as a vehicle of communication with unique affective and erotic power—capable of generating unmatched emotion and empathy necessary for effective storytelling.
Amidst the debris of Pakistan’s somewhat barren independent cinematic landscape, Sumar’s intellectual and professional commitment to film and documentary as a medium and career provides reason to remain cautiously optimistic about the potential for more individual successes, which, as she points out, are likely to become more frequent due to the availability of cheaper technologies of production and proliferating new media. The paramount question of whether these sources of individual talent and creative growth in filmmaking will nourish and in turn support more collective social projects and ideas remains unanswered.
AN: Could you speak a bit about yourself and how you got into filmmaking? Your formation— intellectually, culturally.
SS: I was born in Karachi and I have lived here most of my life. Growing up I had a strong base in Urdu poetry and literature, Farsi and music. My father was in business and also in politics. He was a student with the Pakistan Muslim League in Jinnah’s time and my parents migrated to Pakistan in 1947 as a young couple. I love Karachi and I have almost always lived here. I did live away for some years while I was studying and then my husband was invited as Foreign Research Scholar to the Jawaharlal Nehru University, so we moved to Delhi. But other than that I have been here. And I kind of grew up in an environment that was not very normal in the sense that it was not 9-to-5. My father was reading and reciting poetry and we grew up with that in our ears all the time. So, it was an unusual kind of household but a very warm and very loving and secure environment. It was a lovely childhood actually. I am very fortunate that my growing up years were so content and peaceful.
AN: Where were your parents from in India?
SS: My father was born in Bombay; my mother in Nasik. At the age of seven or so, my mother moved from Nasik to Bombay. My parents lived just a stone’s throw from the Mahim ki Dargah (there is a shrine of Makhdum Ali Mahimi in Bombay). My parents had a Sufi orientation to life and that was their introduction to religion—ours too. We grew up listening to qawwalis, Sufi poetry, and stories of Sufi saints like Hazrat Rabia Basri. It was that kind of environment, full of stories. Storytelling was very natural and my father loved to talk. He loved to tell stories. It was just there; you could not escape it even if you wanted to.
AN: What kind of stories?
SS: A lot of them were stories from, say, Bostaan-e-Saadi or Gulistan-e-Saadi. They were stories of Sufi saints and their experiences, religious, and philosophical stories; lives of poets like Mirza Ghalib, Mir Taqi Mir, and so on. Our basic orientation was toward philosophy and the history of religion and Sufism.
AN: And then while growing up how did this develop in relation to your intellectual formation—your upbringing and your exposure to culture and politics in Pakistan and then abroad?
SS: While growing up I became very interested in Urdu poetry and wanted to learn Farsi and be able to read that on my own. I was also very interested in music. Somewhere along the line, I felt that I was going to be a filmmaker. I used to watch Pakistani films all the time. Then, when Indian films started coming in through pirated channels, we bought a VCR and used to rent VHS tapes and watch Indian films. The first one I saw was Amar Prem. It was beautiful. And we used to watch Urdu films regularly, Pakistani films at Drive-in cinema or Khayyam cinema which were very close to my house. And there was something about cinema that always appealed to me—I felt, “What a wonderful way to get a story in!,” because you would be laughing and crying with your actors; you would be taking sides and positions in the film and this was something that, for me, only this art form did. No other art form brought out such strong emotions in me; it seemed to me that we could really speak about our lives through films and get other people to see and feel…That is the most important thing about films, feeling…that you can get others to feel an emotion that they were not able to recognize or have or experience. You could really get people to understand others better. So, if you have a message, if you want to get something across, I thought in my own way then (I think I was 9 or 10 at that time) I thought, films is it. Film is going to do it. It is going to change the world because things that we do not understand, other people’s points of views that we do not understand, the empathy that we lack is all going to be possible through films with stories well told.
So I started believing in the power of films very early on and at 16, I was completely adamant that I was going to a film school. I had written off for the prospectus of the London Film School and I had also written to RADA (The Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts), because at one point I thought I might become an actor. I had prepared my work that I was to submit at RADA. At 16, it is a bit early to plan for college life, but I was completely there. That is where I was going. When I had filled out the forms, I needed to discuss it with my father, to let him know what my plans were and that he would be footing the bill! We sat down (we had a very good relationship) and he said, “Well I want you to think about this, and I don’t want you to give me an answer right away, but when you say you want to make films, are you saying that you want to be a cameraperson, you want to be a soundperson, you want to be an actor or do you want to actually make films i.e. be a filmmaker?”
That question stumped me. I thought, “Oh ok, so I have to kind of think this through,” and it forced me to look into what it was about films that grabbed me. So a few days later, I went back to him and said no I do not want to be a technician. I want to be a filmmaker because I am going to use my ideas to change the world, change the way people look at events, and how they see things. So he said, “That’s very good then. But that means you shouldn’t just go to a film school. Perhaps you could go to a school which would connect you with the world of ideas. Which means that you should be reading philosophy, poetry, literature, history, anthropology, politics and all kinds of things so that you become a really strong storyteller. Your films will be stronger.”
So I thought that was very exciting! Now where was I going to find a place that would combine films and all of this? I started looking at American universities and colleges. Among others, I found Sarah Lawrence, which had a very strong performing arts and creative department. A liberal arts education in a school that gave me good exposure in films was what I wanted. So I applied and I got in and I spent three years there which were really great. I had the best years of my life, I would say. I was very engaged, it was a very intense time and I loved it. It was very good compared to my schooling in Karachi which was very difficult.
AN: Why was your schooling difficult, if I may ask?
SS: Because education has to be real. It cannot be an imported graft on society. I went to a school that did not appreciate Urdu or Farsi or any of that. It was a very English school. Schools in the subcontinent—India and Sri Lanka, etc.—have developed their own education system so they are not dependent on a colonial value system. Pakistan insisted that the most valuable education was Oxford and Cambridge O’ levels and A’ levels. I thought there was something wrong with that because we really needed to develop our own education system that was aligned with our values. The fact that we do not have a cohesive education policy has been a very disruptive and divisive force. This conflict has divided people between the English speaking and non-English speaking. Of course, you have class divisions in this country, but this is an added burden—one which is very difficult to sort out.
AN: Can you provide one or two examples of your early connection to films—memories of cinema experiences that you might recall from your childhood/early adulthood in Karachi?
SS: Pakistani films were not particularly well made and stories were clichéd. But for me, it was not about that. It was about the thrill of going to the cinema, seeing talking moving people, crying with them sometimes, and laughing. I thought Waheed Murad was such a great actor. If Pakistan had made a Devdas, he would fit perfectly. I liked Rani. I am very bad at remembering names of films, even recent films. But I remember scenes. I remember the film Zarqa, because it had a horrific scene in which a woman is tied in chains and lashed. I was perhaps 8 years old then but I remember—it was such a sexy, violent scene.
We used to go once a month to Drive-in and my mother used to go with us. Then once in a while, we would go to Khayyam cinema. And then, we would always see a film on the third day of Eid, also at Drive-in cinema. I loved the excitement of getting in that queue of cars and going and finding your spot. The sound quality was terrible, it was blaring—but it was just so exciting. Cinema was such a thrilling experience. Just talking about, it has made me so happy. It is such a pity a whole generation of Pakistanis has missed that experience.
AN:Khamosh Pani came out in 2003 but you made documentaries before that. Could you talk a little about your entry into filmmaking as a career?
SS: Yes I made several documentaries. Khamosh Pani started as a documentary too (Images 2 and 3). I was developing an idea for the 50th anniversary of partition of India and Pakistan in 1997. I got some development funds for research I was doing on women who were abducted during partition in Pakistan as well as India and as my research progressed I met a woman who, I believe, had been abducted during partition. She never said it but I felt it so strongly that I could not bring myself to ask her. As I listened over and over again to that interview, I thought, “What must this woman be thinking now? I’ve opened up all her wounds; I’ve laid them bare…. I don’t think I can do this.” Getting people to talk about their experiences and reliving them just for a documentary—I could not do that. So I buried the project. I did not touch it for a bit until I was able to digest this whole experience, which was quite traumatic. And then, a story started developing in my mind around her story and other stories that I had picked up. I wanted to hook it to something real in Pakistan—I wanted to go further than 1947—to not say this happened in 1947 and now everything is hunky dory but to connect it to the present and to show that violence and religious intolerance continues to destroy people’s lives; because we, as a civilization, as a society, as a culture have no self-confidence. We refuse to empathize and learn from situations. We involve our egos and constantly deny ourselves the ability to learn, to empathize, and to change. We are dead and rigid.
AN: The environment here is not an easy one to make films. What we can learn from your experience about what it means to make a truly independent film of this quality?
SS: I had been making documentaries for several years with a small team—mainly a foreign crew. And we always tried to hire a local crew and train them because my whole point was that I wanted to train more and more Pakistanis, as many as I could. So for every film, we took on some local crew members and trained them. But the issue really was that they would come back to us and say, “Nobody here needs to or wants to do the work that we know so we never get to practice the things that you teach us. In fact we’re required to work in very different ways and there is never any time to do things in a proper way.” So, they would be very half-hearted about learning and that was very difficult—you are training people for free and you are taking them on-board your own private production and you are getting a foreign crew to be there and teach the people as we go along. But the people we were training were not very motivated.
Courtesy Vidhi Films.
Courtesy Vidhi Films.
When we did Khamosh Pani, there were three starts to the film. We started in the year 2000 and we had very, very little money to do the film. There was no local crew available, and there was no understanding of the different aspects of filmmaking such as a location search, costume design, finding a makeup artist, let alone finding an assistant director which is a very big job. But even for the smallest things, it was incredibly difficult. I used to spend hours talking to people and as they looked at me blankly, I understood that as I was talking I was teaching. So it was a very uphill and very frustrating task. And then nobody was sympathetic. Nobody wanted to help because they were all making their money in TV and they were getting paid so much better for it that nobody cared for what we were doing. So my cameraperson came for a recce; my production designer and various other people came from abroad—from Germany, France, and England. We had paid for all those tickets. They came and they said, “We cannot work with these people, Sabiha. It’s not that we don’t want to train them. They are at such a basic level that we can’t work and train at the same time. Also, actually these people don’t want to be trained because they simply don’t care! On such a large production, a feature film production we are trying to build an infrastructure from the start. This is a huge task and it cannot be done.”
So I said, “Ok, we can’t do it in the budget we have. But if I get a larger budget we can do it because I will then pay to train these people for three months. We will have a three-month long prep, which is a luxury.” So we actually raised the money. We got on a German and a French co-producer, we got all heads of departments; camera, lights, camera assistant, sound, sound assistant, makeup, makeup assistant, costume, production designer, line producer, location manager…that is about all the people that we got from Germany, France, and the UK. We did a three-month long prep. I did the actors’ workshop myself and the rest of my crew worked with the local people and tried to get them to understand what we were doing. We lived in Wah village for this three-month prep plus an eight-week shoot. I used local people as my extras and trained them. I had a very good assistant director. We had a very difficult but a very good time making this film and I think it was one of the hardest things I have ever done in my life: to keep my foreign crew motivated was very hard…. Why should they be? They were not being paid their full rate. And also to keep my Pakistani crew motivated and my actors going was very hard. And when we were two weeks away from the shoot, 9/11 happened. This was our second start in 2001. My crew did not want to leave at all except one or two people. But then, the German embassy had asked all their nationals to leave and with that directive it was very hard for me to convince them that all was okay. They knew that but they were getting calls from their relatives and friends saying that they better come back. So we had to wrap up and everybody left crying and howling. It was a very, very upsetting scene because this was happening for a second time. We had lost a lot of money and we did not have one penny from Pakistan, not one penny.
We then got together again in 2002. I had lost my mother in November 2001, so when we began prepping in January 2002, I was still very shaken up. I really believe, though, that it is my parents’ prayers for me that really saw me through the whole film and also made the film what it is. I could feel my mother’s presence near me all the time. So we began in 2002 with almost the same crew. My cameraman and the soundperson were the same. Some crew members had been replaced and we had to start over again, because the Pakistani crew had dispersed. We could hardly find the same people to be with us, so we had to start all over again the training of new people. We started the shoot and completed it. However, in the eighth week of our shoot, the final week, we lost our major location, the gurdwara, and that started another uphill and very difficult time for us.
AN: How did you lose the location?
SS: There was this scene where the boys storm the gurdwara and shout slogans. And although the people inside the gurdwara knew about this—we had already taken them into confidence, told them what this was about, how we plan to do, etc.—for some reason they got very upset and threw us out after the first scene was shot. So we were thrown out of the gurdwara. We had one major scene in the gurdwara and that was it. Then later, we put in documentary scenes from when the pilgrims came, etc. Somehow, we just managed to get what we needed, but it was a very stressful time. Because nobody understood locations, nobody understood the importance of things; nobody understood what we were trying to do exactly. People around us were very, very suspicious because they could not figure out why anybody would be spending their time, money, and energy over a film. “There must be some hidden agenda to this” and “This woman must have links with some foreign hand.” The information ministry was also suspicious of us and kept asking us again and again, “What are you doing?” and “Why are you taking so much time?” I could only surmise the worst: is it that we as nation do not have confidence in the society that we live in? The official world I was dealing with seemed to have no confidence in its own mental powers and was deeply suspicious and distrusting of me and my work. I constantly faced exhaustion—a feeling of hopelessness as I tried again and again to explain that I am only making a film—I tried to respond to their fear with words of comfort—I have no intention of harming Pakistan or any department or individual. I am making a film that will make us all proud. I want to put Pakistan on the map of world cinema. But they heard nothing, nothing at all.
My German line producer, Peter Herman, called up a private jet agency and booked a private helicopter to do a scene for us, because there were no wind machines available in Pakistan. By the way, all our equipment came from Germany—not just cameras, lights, and sound equipment but even makeup—but we were not able to bring in a wind machine. And we had this very important 1947 scene at the beginning of Khamosh Pani with wind blowing, so we searched in Lahore and Karachi and everywhere, but we could not find a wind machine anywhere. So Peter had thought we could get a private helicopter and if the helicopter would fly over the well we would have enough wind to create the scene. Now, professionally as a director, I do not know what my line producer is doing to make a scene possible for me, so when I got a call from someone who refused to identify themselves and said, “Did you order a helicopter?” I said “I don’t know if I’ve ordered a helicopter.” They said, “Someone named Peter had called and asked for a helicopter. So why do you need a helicopter?” I told them I will get back to them after talking to Peter. So I talked to Peter and got back to them and said, “We have a scene in our film for which we need to create wind. So that’s why we need the helicopter.” There was silence, a very pregnant silence, at the other end. They said, “No but what exactly are you going to do with it?” I said, “We will create wind with it so that the sand blows and then we’ll shoot the scene.” Another silence. I said, “This is just for a scene.” Again they said, “But what do you want to do with it?” So I said, “I’m telling you. This is what I want to do with it. This is what we’re doing. It’s a scene in our film.” So they said, “Ok, send us the scene.” I sent them the scene. They told the helicopter company not to provide us a helicopter. So then I told Peter, “Look we’re not getting the helicopter. Let’s just forget it.” But Peter said, “No, no, we must get it!” So he called the helicopter company (the calls we were receiving were coming from some “no number”) and asked them what was going on. And they were also silent. So Peter said, “Look, in case you think we are spying, it is not possible. We cannot spy because we will be on the ground. You will be in the helicopter. You are going to fly it. We are not going to be in the helicopter so how can we spy? We can’t!” And he would say, “Yes, you’re right but….” And a silence. This game went on for a bit and then I asked Peter to drop it because we were obviously not going to get it. This has been my issue all along. You try to talk logically to people, you are sincere about what you are doing but for them, there must be some hidden agenda. What agenda can a filmmaker have? If I wanted to be a spy then I would be on somebody’s payroll and I would be making a decent amount of money. It is crazy! Anyway, so finally what we did for that scene was very interesting. Myself included, all our crew and lots of villagers got together and we were picking up sand and throwing it with our hands. I did it myself with as many villagers as we could gather. And we did it! We created a scene that was fine. I do not think anybody can tell. Of course, it would have been more powerful if we could have done it with good wind machines but we managed to find a creative way out of a very hopeless situation. I told Peter not to worry. We would manage the scene somehow. When I first said that this is the way we are going to do it, everybody was like “What? You can’t do it like that! You need wind machines, you need a helicopter.” So I said, “Look guys, we don’t have it. And because we don’t have it I’m not going to cancel this very important scene. Let’s try it this way.” And we got something! So, with great difficulty we finished. Amidst hostility and suspicion, lots of eyebrows being raised, and questions being asked, we managed to finish the shoot.
AN: That is a very interesting story. The plight of the independent filmmaker in Pakistan—sums it up really.
SS: You have to remember that this was 2001–2002, my three starts of the film, and at that time private channels had just started opening. Musharraf’s directives on an open media and new TV channels were just beginning. So at that time, it was still the dark ages. People knew very little about the work I was doing. I do not know what people thought but they always asked, “Why are you so persistent about this?” And I kept telling them I just wanted to make a film and I am trying to do it as best as I can. This is what I do. I make films for a living. This is my job and I want to do my job as sincerely and as professionally as I can. And people would just laugh at me and say, “You say such weird things.” But what could I say to them? I had no other answer. So it was very, very difficult to explain to people what I was doing and why I was doing it. The first film I did (“Who Will Cast the First Stone?”) won a Golden Gate award in San Francisco and nobody in Pakistan even batted an eyelid. It was like nobody wanted to know, nobody was interested: “What? What does it mean? It means nothing to us…. Who are you and what do you do and why should I be bothered?” But I was just persistent. I just did my job because that is what I enjoyed doing, that was my bread and butter. I thought well, if people do not know, they do not know. What can I do? And I carried on.
AN: What would you say has been the trouble with independent filmmaking in Pakistan historically?
SS: I have been thinking about this a lot. So this is a bit ruminative. I do not have answers, I do not know, but I am just thinking aloud with you.
I believe that films have to do with self-acknowledgment. It has to do with a vision and sharing that vision. It has to do with identity. What I am trying to say is that there is no tradition of filmmaking in this country. Although Muslims have been part of Bollywood, and if you look at Muslim cinema all over the world—if you look at Iran, Egypt, Tunisia, and Azerbaijan—they each have great traditions of filmmaking. But Pakistan does not, despite the fact that a lot of Muslims who came from India were actors, writers, directors, and songwriters. I believe that the Pakistani leadership never gave the country a direction, a vision, a dream, a self-image, and acknowledgment. And that is why our stories have been all over the place, because they are not directed toward a goal, or guided by a self-image. Our self-image is poor; we lack self-confidence as a society, so it is not an accident that our film industry is a rudderless, directionless, and visionless industry. It did not know where it was going, just like the country and just like many other institutions here. Cinema is and has been viewed in modern times, since the creation of the camera and the moving image as a way to tell your story. But our self-image is always warring with itself. So we could not develop a cinema, because we never had any clear directions and we still do not. And that is why not only our work varies vastly in quality but also our content does not take us further into deeper dimensions of life. Very often, it confirms our worst fears. Often, it underlines our lack of confidence. We have not yet found our voice.
Storytelling is about taking a journey that changes our perspective; we question and rethink persisting themes. So, unless there is acknowledgment that cinema is important, that cinema is three-dimensional life giving you an understanding and developing empathy for situations and experiences that are important for our evolution, for our growth, and for us to be full human beings; that it is nourishment for the soul; unless we can ask, what is Pakistan about, what is our vision, what is our self-image; unless Pakistan can define its dreams; unless Pakistan can define this very clearly and bring on board the majority of this country to agree to that vision—that dream, that self-image—we cannot create anything successfully. We do not have a nation.
AN: And issues relating to infrastructure? Are these also relevant?
SS: An infrastructure would have been there if we had an industry. And the industry would have been there if we had a vision. Because what does it do? What does cinema do? It actually underlines that image. That dream. It shares that dream with the people. Look at the American dream in American films. Look at Indian films and the secular dream in them. The idea of secularism is part of every Bollywood film. The American dream, the dream of prosperity, is part of every American film. And when you say that the Pakistani dream is to be an Islamic state, then I am sorry to say but that is not a dream. That cannot be a dream because you will have a 100 different interpretations of what is a good Islamic state. Each one will be warring with the other, each one claiming to be supreme and how are you going to resolve this? If we had our dream as prosperity, for example, that was something we could show in our films. That would be a dream, a vision, and a goal. We could say, “That’s where we want to be headed.” Prosperity for all. That sounds to me like a good dream. You can use cinema to tell stories that excite people about that. But Pakistan neglected not only cinema but also all the arts because it did not see their importance. It did not see how arts matter. The arts are a mirror, a self-reflection. But for Pakistan, none of these things mattered and I am really not sure now what matters to this country. What are its priorities? Where does it want to be in the next 5 years, 10 years, and 20 years? So while we are making our individual efforts…independent efforts are always guided by self-interest…the larger interest has to be the responsibility of the state and I am afraid that that is really missing and I do not see it coming either.
AN: How do you think the explosion of television media is going to impact or is already impacting filmmaking? There is a lot of new cultural production on television—does this change things?
SS: Even before independent channels came up, Pakistan TV was a very progressive channel and I remember dramas on TV produced by Sahira Kazmi and others such as Khuda ki Basti and Hawwa kay Naam, Noorul Huda Shah’s Asmaan Tak Deevaar. Very, very progressive, powerful and well done pieces of work; television reflected our possibilities as a progressive, developing nation. Of course, TV has its own style, distinct from cinema. Our cinema was always weak but TV was strong. But then unfortunately, when Zia-ul-Haq came, TV also suffered and went through a terrifying phase. There was self-inflicted censorship. It was very insidious because nobody was saying that women should cover their heads, nobody was saying that you should not show men and women together, and that you should not do this or that. But what happened was that society—the country and people—was so brutalized in Zia’s time that they started self-censoring. They thought it was best for women to wear a dupatta on their head, they thought it was best to be very conservative and religious and that everything must conform to that idea because of the message that General Zia sent out when the first democratically elected prime minister of the country was hung. The message of this act was: “We are an intolerant society, we don’t tolerate any dissension, we don’t tolerate any discussion, we don’t want any other point of view. You do as we say or else.” So people just got very scared and started doing what they thought was the state directive. Now, that is the worst thing that can happen to a people, because you rebel against a state directive and say, “No we won’t do this.” But people cannot rebel against themselves. We became a brutalized society from within. We gave up all our self-correcting mechanisms; we relinquished that control, we gave ourselves to the state willingly, voluntarily, and therefore, there could be no fight. And I think Pakistan changed from within. I do not know how it will change back. I do not know what has to happen.
AN: What about the possibilities opened up by digital technology and new media? Could these allow filmmakers to be productive despite the kind of neglect shown by the state?
SS: Yes I think digital technology is great. It makes work easier. I think the media has opened up and now there are a lot of opportunities. I know a number of people who are making films, very low-budget films and I think that is a very heroic effort. And I do not care at the moment if the films are not good quality or if the storytelling is not strong or technical aspects are weak. At the moment, I just feel that we need to let a lot of work come out. The more that comes out the better it is. We need people’s taste to develop, to understand the value of quality work. Let us not criticize it at this point because we need to have a volume of work; a body of work. If we continue with this we will get better. Individual filmmakers will definitely grow and quality will improve. I also think we will have wonderful surprises. I have no doubts about that because people are very motivated. Individuals are very motivated and they are very talented. But unless we have the state giving us direction, we are always going to be headed in different directions—which is also fine—but I do wish there was a vision for this country that could be expressed through other mediums. A progressive image, if we could have that.
