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As I sat across from two-time Academy Award-winning filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy on Monday, she was almost beaming with pride.

It was midday, some hours before the filmmaker would step onto stage to close the latest session of her Patakha Pictures fellowship and mark five years since she started the initiative to empower young female filmmakers.

Naturally, I asked Obaid-Chinoy to start from the very beginning and tell me what led her to start the fellowship in the first place. She said the idea was to give young Pakistani women who have stories to tell “an opportunity for them to be able to craft films and tell those stories”.

She recalled being a young filmmaker herself and said what set her apart from other women of her time who wanted to make films was that she had opportunities outside Pakistan, which was in turn because she had funding and mentorship available to her.

Obaid-Chinoy said young women in the next generation often didn’t have access to those opportunities and she wanted to bridge that gap with the Patakha Pictures fellowship.

Until recently, she said, Pakistan did not have film funds. So, when she started Patakha Pictures, young filmmakers had nobody to go to for support in making their first film.

“If you have an idea and you want to make your first film, who will give you the funding to do that? That’s where Patakha Pictures stepped in,” Obaid-Chinoy said. “We felt that there was a void, and ours is just a very small sort of contribution to the filmmaking ecosphere, but we think it’s an important one.”

I asked the Oscar-winner what it took for someone to get selected for the programme and she said she was looking for young women who had access to a story and were committed to telling it. They didn’t need to be professional filmmakers — that was for the mentors to help with — just passionate about their stories.

Those mentors, she said, were a “rotating cast” of experts from around the world, some even Patakha Pictures alumni, who would assist participants “at each step of the way” in their three- to six-month fellowship.

I asked the filmmaker about the ethnic diversity I’d seen in previous cohorts of the programmes and she said, “It is extremely deliberate on our part to be geographically diverse, to be economically diverse and to be able to give women an opportunity where they haven’t had an opportunity.”

Elaborating on the inequality of opportunity, she said there was a stark difference between someone who grew up in Karachi and someone who grew up in Shimshal, for example. “We cannot judge them as apples to apples. We have to judge them as apples to oranges.”

She said one of the things she was most proud of was that “young women are feeling that they have the confidence to tell the stories they want to tell [and] they’re coming from places you wouldn’t expect to see filmmakers emerge from”.

The filmmaker gave me some numbers to better illustrate how far Patakha Pictures had come in five years. “We’ve funded over 75 filmmakers. Their films have played in over 100 festivals around the world and they have won over 22 awards.”

Obaid-Chinoy said she wished she could “fund 50 filmmakers a year” with the fellowship, but funds were limited. So limited, in fact, that she did not think the programme would make it this far — and that’s in spite of the fact that a lot of the funds come from her own production house, SOC Pictures.

Talking about the most recent cohort, which would have its grand closing ceremony later, the filmmaker said they had four films this year, ranging in topics from a midwife helping deliver babies in the remote Shimshal Valley to another on a “badass woman” who competes in the male-dominated game of tent pegging.

Obaid-Chinoy said she has plans to establish a Patakha House in Karachi under the Patakha Pictures banner in the next five years. She described it as “a space for filmmakers to come, congregate, watch films, get funding [and] get mentorship”.

But that’s just the next five years; she was hopeful it would continue to make an impact well past that point. She said Patakha Pictures was extremely special to her because she hopes the filmmakers she mentors today will continue to tell Pakistan’s stories, “long after I’m gone, and long after our footprints are gone”.

Cover photo: SOC Films