Released on March 8 as the first Pakistani Animated Film to be released and distributed by NETFLIX USA, Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy’s Sitara screens in Karachi to an exclusive audience.
“I don’t just create films; I create movements,” Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy said before the screening of her latest animation, Sitara, at the Nueplex Cinemas in Karachi this weekend. And she wasn’t exaggerating. Each and every project Sharmeen has worked on since 2002, including the Academy Award winning Short Subject Documentaries Saving Face and A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness, have been produced with a deeper, socially conscious purpose in mind.
Often criticized for portraying the grim underbelly of Pakistan, it is this portrayal that has started dialogue and brought attention to all the causes addressed in her films.
It’s the respect and admiration Sharmeen demands for her relentless work that had the cinema swarming with people, despite the (COVID-19) aka Coronavirus threat that has reached pandemic levels all over the world. The 14-minute animation kept viewers engaged for a mere twenty five minutes, which included a brief behind-the-scenes documentary on the making and screening of Sitara. It came with several milestones.
Sitara is, for starters, the first Pakistani Animated Film to be released and distributed by NETFLIX USA. It was released on March 8 – International Women’s Day – for the message it imparts. ‘Let Girls Dream’ being the catchphrase, the short animation revolves around the lives of two young sisters, the elder who dreams of growing up to be a pilot. Her dreams are crushed when her father commits her to marry a much older man; the realization of what he’s done hits him (or at least we’d like to think it does) when she’s driving off in the wedding entourage and when he looks at a paper plane she used to fly. He makes up by ensuring his younger daughter gets an education and chance to live the life of her dreams, as a pilot. The emotions, riding on an extremely impression musical score, delivered this silent film straight to the heart. It delivered two very strong messages: the cruelty of child marriages, especially child brides being forcefully married to older men, and the tragedy of not allowing girls to dream and live their lives accordingly.
While Netflix will take Sitara to literate and tech-savvy viewers all across the world, Sharmeen rightly felt it was just as important – if not more – to take it to villages across the country. Here’s where SOC Films Mobile Cinema came in extremely handy. Traveling across the country, mobile units equipped for screening took the film to remote places, screening it on projectors or inside trucks and mobile units for a limited number of people.
“There are no facilities to watch these kinds of films here so the children, and the elders accompanying the children, eagerly watched this film and took away a very strong message,” said one man. “This is a very important awareness message and this kind of awareness must be brought to areas where it is most needed,” said a young girl, from an unspecified village in what appeared to be rural Punjab. “We all have dreams,” said another young girl, “but we stop pursuing those dreams because there are too many voices saying we can’t do it. This film will give them the awareness and the confidence that girls can achieve anything they set their minds to.”
The BTS footage showed feedback from the young and old, girls and boys from rural areas across the country. Indeed, as Sharmeen earlier said, Sitara isn’t just a film but a movement.
Sitara has been produced by VICE Studios and the film’s Executive Producers include Gloria Steinem, the iconic women’s rights activist, Darla Anderson, the Academy Award-winning producer of Coco and Toy Story 3, VICE Media Group’s CEO Nancy Dubuc, and Emmy-nominated Ariel Wengroff as well as Chinoy’s own animation production studio, Waadi Animations with Imke Fehrmann as the producer. While the animation itself may be a little basic (there is emphasis on delivering expression but not so much on the realism in human face and costume), Sitara’s strongest element has to be its musical score, composed by Grammy and Emmy Award-Winning composer Laura Karpman. The score immediately elevates the film’s quality to an international level as you hear the expertise of the orchestra creating a symphony on which the narrative rides on.
