January 11, 2023 - Filmmaker Zainab Hassan (ZARDA)

ZARDA ( Sweet-rice) a local desert in Pakistan, 17min., Pakistan, Drama
Directed by Zainab Hassan
In this slice of life/drama we peek into the life of a young Pakistani teenage girl Shella who comes from a conservative, lower middle-class family but dreams with an open heart. As she is slowly stepping out in the real world, she is fascinated by the ever-changing aesthetic of the modern life. One such occurrence accounts to her looking at a girl getting hair dyed pink, leaving her utterly mesmerized and longing for something like that for herself. Unfortunately, her cultural norms and lack of bodily autonomy renders it impossible until she is forced to realize and challenge these norms and find her own way out.

Get to know the filmmaker:

Being very aware about my confinement into this socially constructed narrative of genders I’ve always been very sensitive and vocal about issues regarding women. Therefore, personally I always knew I wanted to make a women centric film. Around the time when I was brainstorming for ideas, I read an article in a magazine somewhere about this group of Indonesian women who in Malaka culture were tattooed when they got married, to mark them as “taken”. but after World War 2 some of the single women from that clan tattooed themselves to escape being taken away by Japanese soldiers. So really this idea of taking something which was once used to oppress or put one in a box and to use it as one’s strength, and the spirit to live and flourish in the most unlikely of environments is what inspired me. This central idea then gelled in with my own struggles for bodily autonomy eventually birthed this story.

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