January 29, 2007
The Tri Continental Festival will be screening City of Guilt in Delhi, Mumbai and Banglore.
In Delhi:
On 19 Jan 07 At 11.30 AM
At the Alliance Française de Delhi, Lodhi Estate
In Mumbai (Bombay):
On 2 Feb 07 At 11 AM
At the Little Theatre, National Centre for the Performing Arts, Nariman Point
In Bangalore:
On 9 Feb 07 At 5.40 PM
At the Alliance Française de Bangalore, Thimmaiah Road, Vasanthnagar
January 11, 2007
THE CHANGING CLIMATE, CHANGING COLORS: 24 CONTEMPORARY MUSLIM ARTISTS show in New York City will feature work by Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy. The opening ceremony is on Saturday January 20th at the Henry Street Settlement.
The show will run until March.
January 2, 2007
The Toronto Star has named Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy as one of ten people to watch out for in 2007.
http://www.thestar.com/printArticle/166684
10 to watch in 2007 TheStar.com - News - 10 to watch in 2007
There are many remarkable people in the GTA who help make this city great. One of our most pleasant tasks each year at the Star is to choose 10 with big plans for the next 12 months. Our selection of individuals poised to make a splash in 2007 come from a wide diversity of worlds, from policing to social activism to the arts to sport to science to academia. You probably haven’t heard of some of them. But we predict that as the new year unfolds, you’ll become familiar with all of their names and their passionate commitment to what they do. Let’s raise a toast to 10 people who make the world go ’round.
http://www.thestar.com/printArticle/166609
Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy TheStar.com - News - Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy
LESLIE SCRIVENER
Toronto Star
In a scene from Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy’s first film, Terror’s Children, a Pakistani boy in a pro-Taliban religious school looks gravely at her and says those who believe in God must not watch TV. Women do not need an education and, he says pointedly, the filmmaker’s face should be covered with a veil.
Obaid-Chinoy’s face is not covered. She’s a Smith College alumna and has two post-graduate degrees from Stanford. And her fearless documentaries are shown around the world.
In her short career, launched when she was still in university, Obaid-Chinoy has made 10 personal, passionate documentaries and won as many prizes. Now 28 and based in Toronto, she is making two more films in 2007, one on the lives of Afghan women five years after the U.S. invasion, and another on the legacy of Zimbabwe strongman Robert Mugabe.
Obaid-Chinoy started work on the Afghan women film, which she’s making for Britain’s Channel 4, this month. “I’m not as interested in Kabul, but in the women in the tiny towns and villages, the voices you never hear,” she says.
Terror’s Children, about Afghan refugees living in her homeland, Pakistan, launched her career in 2002 and immediately won three awards.
Her second, a searing look at the rise of fundamentalism in Pakistan, won four more prizes, including the Livingston Award for young journalists under 35. Obaid-Chinoy was the first non-American to receive it. Other winners in the category of international reporting include David Remnick, now editor of The New Yorker, Thomas Friedman of The New York Times and Christiane Amanpour of CNN.
Bill Abrams, former president of New York Times Television, says when he first encountered Obaid-Chinoy, then a college student, “I thought, this person could be the next Christiane Amanpour – sophisticated, smart, fearless.”
With patrician good looks, Obaid-Chinoy had a privileged upbringing in Karachi, one in which education and accomplishment were prized. Her mother, who married at 17 and stayed home to raise six children, wanted to be a journalist and encouraged her five daughters to write and express themselves.
Sharmeen grew up, as she says in one of her films, wearing jeans and listening to Guns N’Roses. She was the first in her family to go to a co-ed school. By 16, she was doing undercover stories on the sale of passports to illegal immigrants. “That landed me in a lot of trouble,” she recalls. Her name, linked with profanities, was spray-painted around Karachi.
When her textile manufacturer father resisted her pleas to go to university in the U.S., she went on 36-hour hunger strike.
Obaid-Chinoy, who lives in York Mills with her husband, investment banker Fahd Chinoy, and his family, says that when she came here after getting married, “It seemed like the kind of country where there were no stories for me – no human rights violations, no women subjugated. But when you live in a country, then you understand its issues.”
Which led to Highway of Tears, about the disappearance of native women in B.C., released this year. The CBC didn’t respond to her proposal, but Al Jazeera International did and funded the project.
“I’d like to do a film in Canada,” she says, “but it’s too difficult. National Film Board funding takes too long, and there’s too much paperwork; by the time the film is approved the topic is dead and gone.
“My topics are timely. When an event is happening is when I want to be there … I think it is our duty to challenge the status quo. What good is my parents’ wealth and education and upbringing if I’m not contributing to the world?”