This week’s One World Media Awards were not quite the Baftas or the Emmys, but for broadcasters and journalists working in the developing world, or covering the developing world in the Western media, they offer a welcome shaft of international limelight. Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy belongs to this second group.
At 27 she is the youngest nominee for the Broadcast Journalist of the Year Award. She has made 12 films in five years, for Discovery Times and PBS in the United States, al-Jazeera and for Channel 4 in the United Kingdom.
Five of Obaid-Chinoy’s films concern her native Pakistan, but she has made documentaries about women in Saudi Arabia, Native American women in Canada, illegal abortions in the Philippines, Muslims in Sweden and the ill-treatment of Zimbabwean migrants in South Africa. Her portfolio is a global tour of gender oppression and social injustice.
Obaid-Chinoy began writing features for a newspaper at 14. ‘When I was 17 I wrote an exposé of the behaviour of rich landlords’ sons, driving around with guns, forcing their way into private parties. The day after it appeared, my father found profane graffiti about me all over the city. He told me to stay indoors and sent his men round to paint over my name.”
Her father, a wealthy self-made businessman, initially opposed her going to university abroad, but her mother was determined her daughters should be educated up to master’s level. ‘I staged a 36-hour hunger strike and my father let me go to Smith College in Massachusetts.”
On a visit home she decided she wanted ‘to do something” about the plight of Afghan refugees after the US-led invasion. ‘The American news channels were full of rhetoric about getting the Taliban and finding Osama bin Laden and nothing about the impact of the war on civilians.”
The then 22-year-old wrote to more than 80 TV companies without result, but an email to William Abrams, head of what was then New York Times Television, resulted in an agreement to fund her flights and provide equipment and two weeks’ training, on condition she would pay them back if they did not like the result.
After a string of films in the US, she was advised to seek co-production partners in the UK. A meeting with Kevin Sutcliffe, Channel 4’s commissioning editor for news and current affairs, led to an offer to make Pakistan’s Double Game, shown in 2005. She has now made five films for Channel 4.
Underlying all her work is a fierce sense that practising Muslim women can be educated and free. ‘Where in the Qur’an does it say a woman must cover her face? I’ve read it front to back and I can’t find it,” she says.
‘I find the political manipulation of Islam to be very troubling. We can’t have a them-and-us attitude. We are part of this planet and we share it with the rest of humanity.” —