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Diamonds are a girl’s best friend, and that girl is Dananeer Mobeen, who was in Moscow on Thursday to receive the Diamond Butterfly Award for Best Actress at the second Open Eurasian Film Awards.

The actor was recognised for her performance in the film Mera Lyari, where she played a girl fighting societal pressures to play football in the infamous Karachi neighbourhood.

Mera Lyari follows a disabled football coach (Ayesha Omar) who returns home to Lyari after escaping an abusive marriage to conduct trials for girls in the area. There, Afsana (Mobeen), in defiance of her strict father, and Kushmala (Trinette Lucas), running from a forced marriage, find an escape in the beautiful game, training in secret with the coach for a shot at competing on a national level.

In an Instagram post on Friday, Mobeen said being recognised for a role that “celebrates women, their strength, their resilience and their right to pursue their dreams, is an honour I find difficult to put into words”.

She said women’s stories deserved to be told, especially “stories about women who challenge expectations, break barriers, find their voices and dare to occupy spaces they were never encouraged to enter”.

The actor said she felt “incredibly fortunate” to be part of a story that stood for something beyond entertainment. “If this film has inspired even one girl to believe that she belongs wherever her heart takes her, then it has done something truly meaningful.”

She thanked everyone who believed in the film, helped bring it to life, and the audiences who embraced it with open arms.

In his post about the award, the film’s director Ali Sajjad Shah said Mobeen’s win was the result of the whole team’s effort, especially producers Waqas Rizvi and Ayesha Omar.

The Diamond Butterfly Awards were first held in 2025 and are presented by the Eurasian Academy for Cinematographic Arts in partnership with the Russian Ministry of Culture.

Mobeen’s win is Pakistan’s second in as many editions of the awards after Sonya Hussyn took home the Best Supporting Actress award last year for her role in Deemak.

While the recognition is certainly a prize in itself, Diamond Butterfly laureates are presented with a statuette encrusted with 5,000 lab-grown diamonds. They are also given a diamond from mines in Russia’s eastern Sakha Republic — a 10-carat piece for Best Film and five-carat gems for all other recipients.

Last year, just the smaller diamonds were valued at over $250,000 according to statements from the organisers and the Russian embassy in Islamabad.

Overall, 41 films from 19 countries were nominated this year and the top prize went to August, a Russian war film directed by Nikita Vysotsky and Ilya Lebedev.

Other winners included Kyrgyz director Kanybek Kalmatov for Aitmatov, Iranian screenwriter Alireza Motamedi for Daughter of the Fairy Lady, and Kazakh actor Zhasulan Kopbergenov for Restart.