MoovieGab

"Pakistan is a very difficult country when it comes to telling stories about women, especially about female protagonists. For the longest time nobody was interested in financing a film with two women in the lead – a mother and a child – and no conventional hero, so to speak. Which is very different for a conventional Bollywood-driven industry. Also, the whole idea of doing a road trip film without a song and dance routine on top of it was something very difficult to fight for in our local industry"

- AFIA NATHANIEL, independent Pakistani writer-director, on the challenges faced in financial sourcing for her debut feature DUKHTAR [DAUGHTER], a 2014 film which was selected as Pakistan’s official submission for the 87th Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film (not nominated). In this thriller which took Nathaniel ten years to gather her resources, the story centres around a woman in the mountain regions of Pakistan who flees her home with her ten year-old daughter, in order to save her from a forced child marriage. Nathaniel finally won the Norwegian film grant (the SØRFOND), which was a brand new production grant set in 2012, given out by the Films from the South Festival. Being one of the seven grantees who received €100,000 helped her to kick start her production, which she went on to receive other post-production grants from Netflix and the Adrienne Shelly grant

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