Between 2002 and 2009, Obaid-Chinoy made a series of films tackling such subjects as the limited freedoms of women in Saudi Arabia, the Taliban’s growing influence in Pakistan, the rape and murder of Aboriginal women in Canada, and illegal abortion in the Philippines. These films had the feel of prime-time news reports, animated less by narrative or aesthetic appeal than by Obaid-Chinoy’s charismatic presence onscreen. In “Reinventing the Taliban?,” made in 2003, she walks through Peshawar as men stare in curiosity. “I’m probably the only woman around,” she announces while exploring a rough neighborhood. At one point, she tries on a burqa—“My God, you can’t even breathe in here,” she says—and enters a local college, where she criticizes the Taliban before a group of men praising the militants. “Is the whole world wrong when they say that the Taliban regime is repressive?” she asks one man. “They used Islam as a front for their own ideas of what’s right and wrong.”

For Obaid-Chinoy, the Taliban represented a betrayal of national possibility. “There was a lot of anger during those interviews,” she said, referring to her conversations with members and supporters of the Taliban. “It almost felt like I was watching how these people wanted to destroy the Pakistan I grew up in. It was my way to unmask them.”

Ed Robbins, who worked with Obaid-Chinoy on “Reinventing the Taliban?,” recalled that, on one shoot, an “open truck filled with guys carrying guns went by as she crossed the street, and all of them started shooting their guns in the air.” She was fearless, he said. She hadn’t told her dad where they were going, and when he eventually found out he sent a security guard to accompany them. “She knows how to be deferential to some of these older men, but yet still be very forceful,” Robbins said. “She has an easy laugh and is very charming, so they become intrigued with her. She’ll have her hands up and start yelling at some big dude. If someone is being rude or something, she will not hold back.”

In the film, Obaid-Chinoy interviews a Taliban supporter named Khurshid Alam.

“The Taliban were good people,” Alam says. “Someone just misinformed you about them.”

“Maybe they were good people, but what they did to women was wrong,” Obaid-Chinoy responds.

“I guess it was a little wrong,” Alam concedes.

“Thank God you agree with me,” Obaid-Chinoy says.

Alam demurs. “I agreed with you so that you would not get angry with me, not because I actually agree with you,” he says.

Obaid-Chinoy described her presence in her first thirteen films as “accidental,” an artifact of the diaristic approach of “Terror’s Children.” But, she noted, “being emotionally involved was important for my stories. You can tell when I’m upset. You can tell how my voice changes depending on who I’m talking to. It was a quality that I could exploit to get stories from people, because of the connections I formed. I understood the nuances of the language.” The first-person format soon revealed its limitations, however. “In the early years, it was the emotions that pushed my journalism, but a lot of time the stories became about me, about what I was experiencing,” she said. She began to recognize the value of finding the right characters. “You can have the best story in the world, but if you cannot eloquently convey it you cannot draw people in,” she said. “If your smile is infectious—those are the people I like, because I know when people watch them they will be moved by the issues that we are trying to talk about.”

One afternoon, Obaid-Chinoy visited an addiction clinic in Peshawar. Although it was situated in an alley off a busy main road, it was a serene place, with intricately tiled floors and an airy courtyard. In an empty office, she set up an audio recorder to interview a former patient of the clinic, a man in his fifties who now worked as a counsellor. Tall and thin, with a kind face, he told her that he had aspired to be a doctor, until, he said, “on the day of my wedding a friend gave me a cigarette with heroin in it.” As Obaid-Chinoy gently asked questions, he spoke with growing emotion. Every time his colleagues and relatives sent him to rehab, he relapsed. He got into debt, and ended up living on a riverbank with other addicts, fleeing across the water whenever the police showed up; some of his friends had drowned in the periodic raids, he said. I was writing notes when I noticed Obaid-Chinoy bouncing in her seat, trying to get my attention. She tilted her head toward her subject, her eyes wide, to direct my gaze: she had got him to cry.

Obaid-Chinoy is adept at coaxing people to share their stories. “When women in Pakistan speak about personal matters like honor killing and rape, it’s hard for them, because a lot has to do with family honor,” Aleeha Badat, a producer who has worked with Obaid-Chinoy, told me. “They don’t even get permission to come and speak on camera, because their families just don’t allow it. But she has a way of making you feel safe, and like whatever we’re doing is for your benefit.” The message Obaid-Chinoy tried to convey, Badat went on, was: “Yes, you’ve been through a horrific experience, but that doesn’t mean your life is over. With your help, we can do something about it and stand up to the men in your life.”

“Saving Face,” for which Obaid-Chinoy and Daniel Junge, her co-director, won an Oscar in 2012, is the first of her documentaries in which she does not appear onscreen. The film follows Mohammed Jawad, a plastic surgeon who treats women who have been disfigured by acid attacks. (According to Pakistan’s human-rights commission, there had been hundreds of such attacks in the previous five years, many of them perpetrated by men against current and former wives and lovers.) The acid-attack victims belong mostly to the lower class, as distant from Obaid-Chinoy’s experience as the girl begging at the car window, but she creates an intimacy with them and their families. The rage is still there, however muted. During filming, the husband of one victim maintained that most of the women in the burn unit had inflicted their own injuries. Obaid-Chinoy recalled, “The cameraman was telling me, ‘Please breathe, please breathe.’ ”

Her next major documentary, “A Girl in the River,” released in 2015, investigated the case of a young Punjabi woman whose father shot her in the head and then, with her uncle, dumped her in a river, because she had eloped with a man of whom they did not approve. In the previous three years, there had been more than two thousand honor killings in Pakistan, most of which went unpunished. The woman, whose name was Saba, survived, and began telling her story, talking first to a local news outlet and to the BBC and then to Obaid-Chinoy. “When we got there, she was almost directing us,” Obaid-Chinoy said: “ ‘You should speak to my mother-in-law. At 6 P.M., my husband is going to come after work. Speak to this doctor—he was my first surgeon.’ She had a lot of strength, and wanted us to get the complete story.” After the attack, Saba’s father and uncle were arrested, and Saba had to decide whether to “forgive” them. (By Pakistani law, honor killings can be absolved if the victim, or her family, forgives the perpetrator.) The film follows Saba as she painfully makes the decision to pardon her relatives, pressured by people all around her: her dad, who is unrepentant; male elders in her neighborhood, who insist that she has violated the norms of the community; her mother, who offers sympathy but will not defy her husband’s judgment.