Two-time Academy Award winning filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy seems to be having another milestone year.
Two-time Academy Award winning filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy seems to be having another milestone year. Apart from picking up her second Oscar for the moving documentary, A Girl in the River, Obaid-Chinoy has given children across the country a reason to smile by producing and directing the sequel to 3 Bahadur titled 3 Bahadur: The Revenge of Baba Balaam. But as the year comes to a close, Obaid-Chinoy’s own chart is on the rise. Just recently, it was announced that she will be the first artist ever to co-chair the 47th World Economic Forum annual meeting in Davos. Scheduled to take place between 17 – 20 January 2017 in Davos-Klosters, Switzerland, under the theme ‘Responsive and Responsible Leadership’, the meeting “will convene more than 2,500 participants from nearly 100 countries to take part in over 300 sessions”.
Obaid-Chinoy, a recipient of the World Economic Forum ‘Crystal Award’ and part of the Young Global Leaders community, on being the first artist and Pakistani to co-chair the annual meeting said in a press statement: “It is a great honour to be the first artist ever to be given the opportunity to co-chair the prestigious World Economic Forum at Davos in 2017. I have always believed that the true mark of any thriving society is the amount of investment made in its cultural and artistic infrastructure. There is, now, an increasing recognition of the fact that business and economics must go hand-in-hand with culture and arts for society to move forward and it is with great pride that I will be representing both the art community and my country, Pakistan!”
Other than the Davos gig, Obaid-Chinoy also won the coveted Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award recently, as announced by Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism for her Oscar winning documentary, A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness. It is her second duPont-Columbia Award, having previously won one for the documentary, Pakistan: Children of the Taliban, circa 2010.
