Pakistani films about women: eight titles that matter

Pakistani cinema has spent two decades arguing about women on screen, and the argument has produced better films than the box office suggests. The titles below are not a canon and they are not ranked. They are eight features and two documentaries in which a woman is the subject rather than the decoration, made between 2003 and 2023, all of them released and all of them available to read about in detail. If you are building a viewing list, start at the end of this article with the suggestions on where to begin.

Mothers who leave

Khamosh Pani, from 2003, is the film that opened the door. Directed by Sabiha Sumar, it is an Indo-Pakistani production shot in a Pakistani village, set in 1979 as General Zia's Islamisation programme reaches a Punjabi community. Ayesha, a widow, teaches the Quran to village girls and refuses to walk to the well. Her son Saleem drifts into a militant group, and the arrival of Sikh pilgrims from India forces her to confront a past she has buried since partition. The film won the Golden Leopard at the 56th Locarno International Film Festival, along with best actress and best direction.

Dukhtar, from 2014, takes the same instinct and turns it into a road movie. Allah Rakhi, played by Samiya Mumtaz, learns that her ten-year-old daughter Zainab is to be married to a rival tribal leader as part of a peace deal, and takes the girl out of the house in the middle of the night. What follows is a pursuit across Gilgit-Baltistan, a truck, a driver who has to decide whether to risk his life, and a mother who has been sold once herself and will not let it happen twice. Afia Nathaniel wrote, directed and produced it as her first feature.

Daughters under pressure

Bol, from 2011, written and directed by Shoaib Mansoor, is the widest-seen film on this list and the bluntest. It is built around a family in Lahore with too many daughters and not enough money, a father whose religious certainty curdles into cruelty, and a daughter who narrates the story from a death cell. It stars Humaima Malik and marked the screen debut of Mahira Khan. It is melodramatic, it argues with its audience, and it put the question of a daughter's worth into mainstream Pakistani multiplexes.

Cake, from 2018, works at a smaller scale. Asim Abbasi's film gathers a family in Karachi around a sick patriarch and lets the two sisters carry the emotional weight, with Sanam Saeed and Aamina Sheikh doing the kind of precise, unsentimental work that Pakistani cinema rarely asks of its actresses. Nothing explodes. The film is about who does the caring, who leaves, and who is expected to stay.

Women who move

Motorcycle Girl, from 2018, is a biopic of Zenith Irfan, a young woman from Lahore who rode a motorbike into the northern areas to fulfil her father's wish. Adnan Sarwar directs, Sohai Ali Abro plays Irfan, and the film's interest is not the scenery but the permission slip: every border crossing, every petrol station and every relative who says a girl should not be doing this. It is the most literal film on this list about the right to move.

The recent wave

Kamli, from 2022, is Sarmad Khoosat's film about Hina, whose husband went to Bahrain for work eight years earlier and has not come back. She lives with her visually impaired sister-in-law, sits as a painter's muse, and the household fills the gap with desire, memory and something closer to a ghost story. Saba Qamar carries it. It is a melodrama in the old sense, and a very modern one in its interest in female frustration.

Joyland, also 2022, is the film that changed the conversation. Saim Sadiq's debut premiered at Cannes on 23 May 2022, the first Pakistani film to do so, in the Un Certain Regard section, where it won the Jury Prize and the Queer Palm. It follows a Lahore household in which the patriarch wants a grandson, the son takes a job at a dance theatre, and his wife Mumtaz, played by Rasti Farooq, discovers how little room the family has left for her own life. It was initially banned in Pakistan, then approved after minor cuts, and became the first Pakistani film shortlisted for the international feature Oscar.

In Flames, from 2023, is Zarrar Kahn's debut, a Karachi-set horror drama in which Mariam, played by Ramesha Nawal, is haunted by visions after her father dies and by the men who decide they now have claims on the family. It premiered in Cannes's Directors' Fortnight and uses genre the way the best horror always does, as a way of making an ordinary threat visible.

Two documentaries worth the detour

Saving Face, from 2012, directed by Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy and Daniel Junge, follows a plastic surgeon rebuilding the faces of acid attack survivors and won the Academy Award for best documentary short, making Obaid-Chinoy Pakistan's first Oscar winner. A Girl in the River, from 2015, directed by Obaid-Chinoy, follows a nineteen-year-old who survives an attempted honour killing by her father and uncle, and won the same award at the 88th Academy Awards in 2016. Both are documentaries, not fiction, and both are more direct about the machinery of violence than any feature on this list can afford to be.

Where to start

Four ways in, depending on what you want from the evening:

• One film only: Dukhtar, the most accessible of the eight, which carries the whole argument.
• The historical anchor: Khamosh Pani first, because every later film is in conversation with it.
• The contemporary one: Joyland, then read about why it was banned and unbanned.
• Programming a season: pair Cake with Motorcycle Girl, one about staying and one about leaving, and put Saving Face after both.

For the director who started much of this, see our profile of Afia Nathaniel, and for the wider regional picture, women directors of South Asia.