[Pakistani-Canadian filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy accepts the award for Best Documentary Short Subject Film for “A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness” at the 88th Academy Awards in Los Angeles on Feb. 28, 2016. REUTERS/Mario Anzuoni]



The controversial practice of honour killings in Pakistan and the redrafting of laws there are front and centre thanks to Pakistani-Canadian documentary filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy’s Oscar win for her powerful documentary, “A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness.”

The film, which won the Oscar for best documentary short, tells the story of 18-year-old Saba Qaiser, a Pakistani woman who survived an attempted honour killing at the hands of her father and uncle.

Qaiser, who is one of the very few survivors of honour killings, was shot in the head, thrown into a river and left for dead after falling in love with a man and eloping with him — all of which were against her family’s wishes.

With the film premiering on HBO in Canada on Monday, the day before International Women’s Day, there couldn’t be a better time for the filmmaker to remind viewers that women are still disproportionately affected by violence.

The journalist turned multiple award-winning documentary filmmaker has been a resident of Toronto since 2004 when she married her Canadian husband. Now living in Pakistan, Obaid-Chinoy still calls Canada home every now and then.

Obaid-Chinoy spoke with Yahoo Canada News from an undisclosed location in Pakistan.

Q: “A Girl in the River” discusses the issue of honour killings in Pakistan. Why was this an important film to make?

A: I’ve been wanting to make a film about honour killings for a while now because honour killings is not something that’s talked about in that part of the world. It’s prevalent in India and in Pakistan, in immigrant communities in the UK and Canada, in the U.S. and many countries around the world. I wanted to sort of explore honour killings and how it has nothing to do with religion or culture, but it really has to do with patriarchy and certain rules. In a patriarchal society, and you get a shift and the balance of power changes, that’s when you see violence against women rise in the name of shame and honour. I wanted to find a survivor of honour killings, especially to talk about what they go through. But the survivors never survive. Victims of honour killings are often dead so I really had to find a survivor to tell this story.

Q: You talked about the importance of the issue as a whole. But why was it a subject that was important and close to you?

A: It’s an important subject because people literally get away with murder and they justify it by somehow saying it’s part of their culture and religion, but there is no justification for murder. And there is no such thing as honour killing. It is cold-blooded, pre-meditated murder and that’s how it should be looked at. People will say, “Oh well they brought shame on us.” There’s no such thing as being shamed and then warranting them being dead.

Q: You said honour killings are not part of any culture or religion and you talk about how victims are often told about forgiveness in their honour killing. How does this all fit together in Pakistan and other countries and communities around the world that participate in honour killings and what does victims’ push for forgiveness have to with how honour killings are handled?

A: The thing about honour killings is you find that men want to control women. When a young woman does not want to get married to somebody who her family forces her to marry, or if the woman wants a divorce, or if a man feels that a woman has slighted him in some way, then they literally just go out and kill her. There’s no two ways about it. What happens in honour killings is that the law allows for forgiveness. So if a father kills his daughter, or a brother kills his sister, the family is allowed to forgive and that law has been manipulated because people are literally walking away and getting away with murder. There was just an honour killing in Pakistan the other day where a brother killed his two sisters. This man had killed his mother two years before and his father forgave him. So what we’re lobbying to do now is to take forgiveness off the table completely.

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