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A Pakistani panel at the Red Sea International Film Festival in Jeddah featuring actors Atiqa Odho and Shahzad Nawaz, as well as Pakistani entrepreneur in Saudi Arabia Nosheen Ahmed Wasim discussed opportunities for filmmakers in Pakistan and collaborations between Saudi and Pakistani artists.

In the session, titled Your next story starts here, at the film festival on Tuesday, director and actor Shehzad Nawaz referred to the 5,000-year-old history of Pakistan, saying that we have an image problem “because if you don’t tell your story yourself, somebody else would do it for you”. His comment is especially relevant given the recent release of Dhurandar, an Indian film set in Karachi’s Lyari that partially explores the city’s gang war and the infamy of gangster Rehman Dakait.

Nawaz highlighted that earlier, Pakistani filmmakers and artists worked solely for their people, but now they had started opening up to the world through digital platforms.

The good news is that Netflix is slated to release its first-ever original Pakistani series on the platform this June while HBO Max is the third digital content platform to enter Pakistan, as Amazon Prime is already there, Nawaz added.

Odho said Saudi Arabia and Pakistan could tell similar stories in a collective narrative as there were many human stories all over the world that needed to be told.

“Everywhere I go in the world, girls have similar stories to tell and we don’t get enough of them on screen. I was going somewhere yesterday, I booked an Uber and when the cab appeared, there was a lady driver. I was so glad to see that because for the longest time in history we were told that women can’t drive cars in Saudi Arabia,” she said, suggesting that a collective women narrative could be developed from this stage.

Nawaz said the analytics of YouTube and OTT platforms showed that Pakistani content was getting more viewership compared to Indian content.

“Pakistan has a population of 10 million people who are digitally connected, 65 per cent of our population is below the age of 30 and they are largely potential consumers of content. We have about 6,000 performing artists and 9,000 production crew from different areas,” he said, adding that having all these figures on our side, Pakistanis are looking forward to collaborations.

Odho said that Maula Jatt was being dubbed in Mandarin to be released in China. “Language is no more a barrier, you can make anything in any language and audiences are used to subtitles and dubbed content, which was earlier not there. There are digital platforms and OTT,” she said.

Nawaz said the world is changing — there is a disruption taking place. “I see traditional cinema not really having a future; otherwise, big studios like MGM and Sony Pictures would not have gone digital.” He said he doesn’t see any difference between cinema, web series and docudrama as “a piece of content is a piece of content, I see its future beyond the camera”.

To a question on political cinema,Nawaz said after his film Chambaili (2013), he was targeted by gunmen because a political party’s leader in Karachi thought it was against him. He had to leave the city for Lahore and while in Lahore, there was another political party whose leaders thought the movie was against them. “It was the first political thriller in cinema. Now when I look back, I think I would have been better off with three love stories instead of that one political film.” He said though the film was a box office hit, he considered it his glorious failure.

During the panel session, it started raining cats and dogs in Jeddah. After the talk was over, the organisers had to cancel the remaining sessions and film screenings for the day.