NEW YORK - The 2016 Academy Awards are now just hours away with stars from around the world waiting to take a stroll up the red carpet into the Dolby Theatre in Los Angeles, California, with some of them, including Pakistan’s Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, hoping to leave with a coveted Oscar statuette in hand.
The star-studded ceremony will start at 8:30 pm (0630 am PST Monday).
Producer-Director Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, who won Pakistan’s first Oscar four years ago, is hoping to scoop a second Academy Award for her harrowing film about a teenage girl shot in the face by her own family.
“A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness” tells the story of 19-year-old Saba Qamar who was beaten, shot and thrown into the river after she ran off to marry her fiance, whom her family initially accepted — and then decided was too poor. The 40-minute film goes head to head with four other nominees in the documentary short subject category at Sunday’s Oscars in Hollywood.
“I feel the film has helped bring new attention to the issue,” Obaid-Chinoy said in a recent conversation with Asia Society.
“Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif pledging to work on honour killings has, no doubt, helped elevate it and started a much-needed national discourse about why this heinous crime exists in our society,” she said. “I feel that as a father and a grandfather, it is important for [PM Sharif] to make that gesture to the women of Pakistan”.
Survivors of honour killings are rare and the film offers a stark look at the pain — physical and emotional — inflicted on Saba, her extraordinary resilience and ultimate failure to see her father and uncle convicted. They beat her, shot her in the face and dumped her in a burlap sack in the river.
At the last moment, she tilted her head, meaning the bullet grazed her cheek instead of shattering her skull. Somehow she managed to cling to the bushes and pull herself out of the water. She went to police and to hospital. Obaid-Chinoy, who read about her ordeal one morning in the newspaper, tracked her down and filmed Saba’s story over eight to nine months in 2014.