Artists and creators throughout history
have spoken of inspiration practically from the cradle,
a tendency toward writing or sculpture or music
from before they could speak.
Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy is not one of those artists.
I was 21. I never studied film.
I've studied economics and government.
So I literally typed into this search bar visual journalism.
And the word documentary films popped up,
and I was like, that's it.
I'm gonna be a documentary filmmaker.
Her films have won Academy Awards,
Emmys and numerous other honors.
She's become one of the most influential advocates
for human rights around the world,
focusing specifically on the plight of women,
in her home country of Pakistan, and beyond.
I spoke with Sharmeen about her insatiable desire
to speak truth to power,
and the power that comes from listening closely
to those whose stories need to be told.
Women are realizing that they want a say in their lives,
that they want to see in how the government treats them,
that they want to see in having more space
in the public sphere.
And men are afraid.
Tell me about growing up, your growing up years.
Because from everything that I've read and heard about you,
it's so formative.
Your family is so formative.
From a very young age, something was instilled in you.
I grew up in Karachi, Pakistan.
And, you know, I'm the eldest of six children,
five of them girls.
I grew up in a family
that wanted the daughters to have an education.
We were free to speak our minds.
And that was very encouraging.
From a very young age, I realized that I had grown up
on the side of the tracks where I was very lucky.
And I remember one particular instance
when I was about 10 years old and I was driving,
I was going to school
and my car had stopped at a traffic light.
And I remember looking out of the window
and I saw a young girl,
she was about 10 years old
and she was barefoot and she had her hand pressed out
and the nose was glued to the window screen
and she was begging.
And I remember thinking, why is she not in school?
And I always had these questions, you know,
like, why is this not happening?
Why is that not happening?
Pakistan is a society which frowns upon questions
that are probing.
You know, you're supposed to accept the status quo.
This is just the way it is.
Don't talk about this. It'll bring shame.
And so I was that annoying kid in class
who would put up their hand all the time
and ask difficult questions.
And at home I did that as well.
And my mother was raising five children was like,
you need to ask someone else these questions.
And she encouraged me to write.
And I became a writer when I was about 14 years old.
And I think I've never looked back.
Sharmeen's innate drive to ask questions
and seek the answers led her to the United States
were she pursued her higher education at Smith College,
that was despite her family's initial reluctance.
Although she studied economics and political science,
her experiences at Smith
ultimately led her down a different path.
You know, when I was on campus, I had a lot of sit ins.
I was a very, I was involved in student government.
I was junior class president.
I was very politically active.
And it gave me an opportunity
to meet people from around the world,
women who came from Africa and Asia and the United States,
who, if you think, would have had different experiences.
But let me tell you,
women around the world share a lot in common.
It doesn't matter where they come from.
There is an inherent bias against women
that exists in almost every society in the world,
whether it's in the north or the east
or the south of the west.
And I think that was a transformative period for me
as a individual, because right out of Smith,
I decided to take up documentary filmmaking
and switch my career.
All right, so on that note, you give me a great opening
to talk about what I think is a pivotal moment.
I think you'll agree.
And I got a chance to catch up
with your colleague and friend Trish.
And she talked about meeting you for the first time
and a pivotal moment that you have
with a very well known news organization
here in the United States.
When we met, it was in a coffee shop
and it was like realizing that we shared the same goal
of finding voices that weren't being heard,
giving them a voice, giving them a light,
and we were young at the time
and we didn't have connections.
And Sharmeen, like, marched into the New York Times office
and said, you know, "I have a story
and I want to make a film."
And, you know, it was kind of an outlandish thing to do
in your early 20s.
And she was able to do it.
And she went and she made films on the front lines
of a lot of war zones in the Middle East
and came back and delivered these stories
from people who are suffering from injustice
and whose voices weren't being heard.
And they made it to New York Times
and reached an international audience.
So that's a big moment, obviously.
Yes, it was.
You know, I was 21 years old
and I was writing for these newspapers,
and 9/11 had happened,
and I would watch the nightly news
and I would see all these people
catch up into South Asia and into Afghanistan and Pakistan
and with very little understanding
of what the politics of the region were
and what was happening.
And I thought to myself, I can tell stories
from that part of the world to this part of the world.
And I've wrote up this proposal for my first film.
I wanted to do a film
about the impact of the war in Afghanistan
on the youngest victims of the war,
which were the children of Afghanistan.
And I sent it off to about, I mean, 80 organizations
in the United States.
Every production house I could find.
One day online, I found the e-mail address
of the president of the then New York Times television.
And I emailed him and, you know, 15 minutes later
he responded and I bought my first suit
and got on an Amtrak train and went to New York.
And I pitched it to the editorial board
of The New York Times.
And they funded my first film, my first feature film.
Sharmeen spent her first 15 films
in front of the camera, amplifying powerful stories
through her own experience, and with her own voice.
By 2011, she'd decided to put the focus
squarely on the lives and struggles of her subjects.
That led to her breakthrough film, "Saving Face,"
about women in Pakistan
who've been the victims of acid attacks.
The film earned her an Academy Award,
the first ever won by a Pakistani.
To all the women in Pakistan, we're working for change.
Don't give up on your dreams.
This is for you.
I immersed myself in a world where so many women
literally were disfigured
simply because they were brave enough to say no,
no to violence.
When acid is thrown on your face,
your entire face carries that mark forever.
When you wake up in the morning
and you see your face in the mirror,
you're reminded of that incident.
And telling this story was so important
because the legislation in Pakistan
was so weak around acid violence at that time
that Daniel and I felt that this was a story
we needed to tell.
We need to impact legislation
and in fact, the way people saw acid violence
in the country.
I think the moment for me in this film was when Zakia,
who is a woman who had had acid thrown on her face
by her husband because she wanted a divorce.
I remember walking in to film her one morning and,
you know, half of her face was gone,
it had been disfigured
and she was peeling apples for her daughter
and she was smiling
and they were telling jokes to each other
about cats and kittens.
And they were both laughing.
And in that mother daughter moment, I realized
that these are some of the bravest women that I have met,
because through this ordeal, they have laugh and joke
and not forgotten that they are, after all,
mothers and human beings.
And that's why that story really changed
the way I saw the strength of a woman.
And that clearly vault you to a new level in your career.
You've become much better known globally
and also in your own country,
where obviously you're well known at that point,
but this is a new level
and things start to accelerate for you.
Does it become harder or easier as you gain more notoriety?
Pakistan does not take to well,
to having a woman who has a voice
and who's not afraid to do so.
And I think that when I won my first Academy Award,
people suddenly realized that I had a voice
and there were many who wanted to silence it
because I was taking up issues
that they didn't want to taken up,
especially not on the global level.
And, you know, I would wake up some mornings
and I would read social media
and I would learn some things about myself
I didn't even know were true.
And so, you know, there were massive campaigns
that were started to discredit me.
But, you know, none of it can stick
because all I'm doing is telling stories that are,
real stories that need to be told.
It's interesting that we're talking about this
because I want to bring in another interview about you
to have you watch with your friend Marvy.
Marvi Mazhar is a prominent architect
based in Karachi, Pakistan.
She's bonded with Sharmeen over the important role of women
in Pakistani society.
I think Pakistan is so open to ideas right now
and every different platform from artist community,
from a bureaucratic level,
I feel they're giving that space to women
and generally to new ideas.
I feel Pakistan has a lot of potential
in giving that space to others.
It makes its mistakes.
It has its own teething issues.
But that's where people like Sharmeen
bring in a lot of perspective,
working with the government, working with local diaspora
and then bringing and knitting it together.
So I feel that we, all of us are have the same vision
of making Pakistan on a platform
where it recognizes such new ideas and new ventures.
So she seemed when I spoke with her, very optimistic,
I think that comes through in that comment.
Do you share that?
I do. I share the optimism.
And I'll tell you this,
that the Internet has changed Pakistan.
There is a free flow of ideas.
If you would ask me in my 20s
would I work with the government, I would have said never.
But I do work with the government in Pakistan
on projects a lot.
I currently am working with the Ministry of Human Rights,
with the Ministry of Justice.
But I will also say this,
that it is a country where you have to dance,
where you have to walk the fine line,
where you have to think about the project
that you're working on and the personal repercussions
those would have on you.
And so I have learned to navigate those worlds.
And when you live in Pakistan,
I think you're sort of born with that navigation skills.
As Sharmeen's influence has expanded,
so has her portfolio.
Her 2016 short documentary, "A Girl in the River,"
about honor killings of Pakistani women,
won her a second Oscar,
the first time anyone had won twice in the category.
This is what happens when determined women get together.
The film's international recognition
helped inspire legislation in Pakistan
that made honor killings illegal.
That closed a loophole
that had previously allowed the practice to go unpunished.
My film deals with forgiveness
and how the law is manipulated,
and now they're going to change that.
She's also taken on subject matter
far beyond her home country's borders,
calling out what she saw as exploitation
in American college sports
in the documentary "Student Athlete."
She's also produced a range of animated films
to broaden her audience.
In addition to thinking about what to make,
she's also thinking about who's making it
and who's watching the finished product.
About four years ago, I thought about my body of work.
I've created so many films. Who's watched them?
You know, of course, I have a global audience,
but locally, who's been able to watch them?
The ones that are on the Internet are still accessible
to the ones who have access to Internet.
And so I built a mobile cinema
that goes from village to village, town to town,
showcasing not just my films,
but also films of other filmmakers.
And the idea was that we would take these films
into the heartland, into the towns and villages
where men and women and children together could watch films
and have discussions afterwards.
And our films range from, for women,
how to inherit property or how to get a divorce,
or if they're battered, you know,
which is a shelter, they can go to,
those informational films.
I feel like the choices I'm making
have a lot to do with ensuring that the next generation
in my country has the opportunities that I did
by exposing them to thoughts and ideas
and competing worldviews.
You've said something
that I wanted to get you to talk a little bit more about,
which is men watching your films.
You know, globally, I feel like men of all nationalities
are reckoning with our history as a sex,
our history as it relates to women.
How has your relationship with the male population,
as it were, if you can generalize, changed?
There are men in Pakistan who abhor me,
who cannot stand me,
who think that I should be silenced.
And that's because they're afraid
that women like myself will take back power,
that we will no longer be seeking permission,
that we will just grab it.
And at the same time, I have a lot of men
who come up to me at airports,
who come up to me at public spaces and say,
"I want my daughter to be just like you.
I want her to be free.
I want her to be able to speak her mind."
So as Pakistan is a society that is changing,
there will be people who will love me and my work
and there will be people who will dislike me and my work.
But I choose to hear the voices
that cheer me on to the finish line
and not the ones that want me to be silenced.
You know, it strikes me, as you're speaking,
that you're going back to this this idea of balance
and in an interview you gave,
you talked about your desire and your need
to provoke anger sometimes because anger leads to action.
And yet at the same time, it feels like there's a tone
through so much of your work
that is about hope and encouragement.
And I do wonder how you strike that balance
and how you go about doing that daily,
how you go about doing that as you choose projects
and make films.
I think that anger is a really important emotion,
because when you're angry,
then you're moved to discuss issues,
you're moved to push legislation through,
you're moved to ensure that that injustice
does not happen to anyone else.
But I think it's equally important
in the world that we live in today
when a 24 hour news cycle to have hope,
because if you don't have hope,
then you don't have a desire to create change.
And so it's important for me to show the wins
as much as it is important for me to show the losses.
And I think it was a few years ago,
I decided that I no longer wanted
to talk about issues.
I wanted to talk about the champions
who were creating change,
who were working on those issues.
We understand that that issue is enormous.
We understand that it probably outlive our lifetime,
but that someone is working on that.
And that gives us hope
that you're chipping away at something
day by day by day.