The following interview with renowned filmmaker Sabiha Sumar was conducted in May 2013 around the time of release of her latest feature Good Morning Karachi (Image 1). It provides a series of rare insights into the often debilitating challenges that have hindered the development of a world-class cinema in Pakistan. Despite the existence of impressive individual contributions such as her own internationally acclaimed Khamosh Pani (2003) the making of which is described in detail below, independent production in particular has suffered from a lack of recognition and support from state and society. Difficulties begin with pragmatic obstacles—above all coping with the absence of technically skilled practitioners that can be relied upon in the production process, a problem that means every individual project of making a film is simultaneously an exercise in training. More fundamentally, the suspicion among state authorities and at times local communities toward the arts creates a hostile environment in which maintaining high production values and criticality toward official narratives comes at a high price. The presence of international film crews imparting knowledge and expertise that can be used by local crew on present and future productions, instead of being met with warm gratitude as a positive and welcome development, can result in outright paranoia, as the epic story of Khamosh Pani’s making renders clear. In a speculative rumination on the source of these problems, Sumar cites the particular importance of the Zia years, in which society’s subjugation by the state stunted independent thought and creative expression. More fundamentally, she relates the lack of importance attached to the arts to a deeper absence of vision, direction, and confusion around identity within the elite. In doing so, she echoes commentators like Tariq Ali who have contrasted Pakistan to India for its lack of a coherent national identity. Sumar’s testimony amounts to a sobering message about the ideological dysfunctions and structural limitations that have condemned independent filmmakers to operate under extreme difficulty, and even more problematically, as individuals in relative isolation: the cultural situation in Pakistan prevents their work from flourishing collectively as part of cultural projects that can generate and sustain deeper and broader legacies.

Against this backdrop, her personal trajectory as a filmmaker is all the more intriguing. Born to a progressive Bombay-based family with Muslim League sympathies, and presumably, some faith in the idea of Pakistan, her childhood exposure to traditional Indo-Persian literary influences—poetry, music, Sufi philosophy, and storytelling—had a formative impact on her pursuit of the screen as a career. Unlike some filmmakers who opt exclusively for technical training when it comes to education, Sumar’s preference for an intellectual grounding in the liberal arts appears to have prioritized content over form. And yet, her passion for film took root early during an upbringing that recalls a bygone time when visits to the cinema were quite normal among Karachi’s middle classes. In the pleasures of the theatre

and erotic power—capable of generating unmatched emotion and empathy necessary for effective storytelling. Amidst the debris of Pakistan’s somewhat barren independent cinematic landscape, Sumar’s intellectual and professional commitment to film and documentary as a medium and career provides reason to remain cautiously optimistic about the potential for more individual successes, which, as she points out, are likely to become more frequent due to the availability of cheaper technologies of production and proliferating new media. The paramount question of whether these sources of individual talent and creative growth in filmmaking will nourish and in turn support more collective social projects and ideas remains unanswered.