Sarwat Gillani shares plans to make women-focused films in Pakistan

Everyone recognises the need for more women-centric films in cinemas but what's being done to make it happen?

In her latest interview with BBC Urdu, Sarwat Gillani revealed that she and her industry friends Mahira Khan, Aamina Sheikh and Sanam Saeed are trying to form a women's collective that works to improve female representation both in front of the camera and behind it.

The idea is something like this: "We have rich friends, people who want to invest in films. We each bring 10 people, we start with four films. The topics can be about men and women, but we want to [create a set culture where] camerawomen are also present and women are hired as spotboys too."

Sarwat also revealed that they had envisioned JPNA 2 to be a film where the female characters take the lead, "but they said our people aren't ready for female-centric cinema yet. The unfortunate thing is that men take their families to watch films in the cinema, they want to see themselves as heroes."

The JPNA 2 star feels that change won't happen without consolidated effort.

"There are very few people who would think beyond themselves, think of society, think of the woman to come after her. There are very few people to do this. It's a difficult undertaking in itself because channels don't support this, individual producers don't support this, we keep talking about it but we have to build a platform."