Oscar goes to Pakistan film ‘Girl’ on honor killings – Tragic tale of Winehouse wins best docu feature

This news has been read 5361 times!

HOLLYWOOD, United States, Feb 29, (Agencies): A documentary about a Pakistani girl shot in the face by her own family won an Oscar on Sunday, after helping persuade the government to fight so-called “honor killings.”

“A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness” won the Academy Award for best documentary short at the star-studded ceremony in Hollywood. The Oscar win was the second for director Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, who recently met with Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif amid the growing global spotlight on the film.

“This is what happens when determined women get together,” she said as she accepted the golden statuette. Chinoy in her speech praised “all the brave men out there, like my father and my husband, who push women to go to school and work and who want a more just society for women.” The film follows 19-year-old Saba, a survivor of an attempted honor killing who was beaten, shot and thrown into a river after she ran off to marry a man.

Shattering

At the last moment, she tilted her head, meaning the bullet grazed her cheek instead of shattering her skull. In a rarity for such attacks, she not only survived but went to police.

But under a controversial part of Islamic law in force in Pakistan, men who kill female relatives escape punishment if they are “pardoned” by relatives through blood money.

After meeting Chinoy recently in Islamabad, Sharif in a statement vowed to “rid Pakistan of this evil by bringing in appropriate legislation.”

“That is the power of film”, Chinoy said at the Oscars.

She earlier told AFP that a victory at the Oscars would build momentum for change.

“I think if the film were to win an Academy Award, then the issue of honor killing, which doesn’t just affect women in Pakistan but affects women around the world, would really gain traction,” she said.

Chinoy in 2012 won Pakistan’s first Oscar for “Saving Face,” a 40-minute documentary on the horrors endured by women who suffer acid attacks.

It focused on two women, Zakia and Rukhsana, as they fight to rebuild their lives after being attacked by their husbands, and British Pakistani plastic surgeon Mohammad Jawad who tries to help repair their shattered faces.

Meanwhile, “Amy”, a documentary about the musical genius and drug-and-alcohol fueled death of jazz singer Amy Winehouse, won the Oscar for best documentary on Sunday.

The win capped a stellar awards season for the film, which is coming off dozens of other awards wins, including from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, the Grammys, and numerous critics contests.

The film, with a gross box office haul of $8.4 million so far, represents 43-year-old London-born director Asif Kapadia’s first Oscar. It is now streaming on Amazon’s Prime video service in the US.

“This film’s all about Amy, showing the world who she really was,” Kapadia said, describing the troubled singer-songwriter as “funny”, “intelligent” and “someone who needed looking after.”

Kapadia shares the Oscar with producer James Gay-Rees, who also executive produced the Kapadia-directed documentary “Senna”, about the early death of Formula One race driver Ayrton Senna, in 2010. The duo are taking on the life of soccer player Diego Maradona in their next documentary.

Winehouse’s father, Mitch, who is portrayed encouraging Amy to continue to perform despite troubles with substance abuse, and brought in a camera crew during a vulnerable point in her career, has slammed the filmmakers on Twitter, calling the film “one dimensional, miserable and misleading.”

Kapadia and Gay-Rees shrugged off the criticism in a backstage interview with reporters.

“Our job wasn’t to blame anybody, it was to tell people how great Amy was,” Gay-Rees said.

Kapadia said the film “became about everyone else, and how complicit you may have been, however large or however small, in the way you betrayed her.”

This news has been read 5361 times!