Dawn Images

When Asim Abbasi’s Churails released in 2020, it wasn’t appreciated by members of Pakistan’s entertainment fraternity, according to Sarwat Gilani, one of the leads in the show.

“No one in my industry celebrated the success of Churails,” Gilani told a surprised Faizan Syed in a clip from his podcast Digitales uploaded on Tuesday. “They can’t handle someone else’s success, ‘they were successful, I wasn’t,’ they’ll rot [with jealousy].”

The actor added that posting on social media, putting up Instagram stories, isn’t celebrating, that’s just something managers ask industry professionals to do.

Gilani recalled meeting a “very prominent actor” in Dubai who didn’t even bother to bring up her critically acclaimed film Joyland — Pakistan’s first film to be shortlisted for an Academy Award. She said her manager ended up mentioning it, to which the other actor replied saying, “Five, I am bringing five films to festivals.”

She said she had stopped calling herself a celebrity because celebrities need to be celebrated.

In another clip from the episode, the actor lamented the way women are portrayed in Pakistani dramas, saying, “How does [the girl] keep falling for such a man, ‘This hero hits me, he’s the crown atop my head.’ For God’s sake, he’s hitting you, cursing at you, disrespecting your parents.”

When Syed asked what other way there was to show the adversity women face in their lives, Gilani said you don’t necessarily have to show a woman in a state of oppression and misery, you can instead show “what she achieved after overcoming her hurdles”.

She said the way to inspire a nation was by “telling your own stories”.

This isn’t the first time the actor has spoken about the lack of support for her more unorthodox projects. When Churails first released, the actor acknowledged in an interview with the BBC that she and her co-stars knew there were risks to making such content.

“Every actor knew they’d have to go into a safe house after this releases, because you don’t get that kind of content here. But I’ve been playing the victim, the bahu, the girl next door, and it was all safe. This was time to do something different.”

When Joyland had its censor certification pulled a week before its theatrical release, she said a “paid smear campaign” has been doing the rounds against the film, recounting that Joyland made history for Pakistani cinema and got cleared by the provincial censor boards.

Gilani said the authorities had caved into the pressure from “some malicious people who have not even seen the film”. She called it shameful that a film made by 200 Pakistanis for over six years, that got standing ovations from Toronto to Cairo to Cannes is “being hindered in its own country”.

She pleaded with the authorities not to take the “moment of pride” away from Pakistani people who know what they want to watch. She also asked those responsible not to insult the intelligence of the people and the hard work of everyone who worked on the film.