She has won two Oscars, six Emmys, and in 2012 Time magazine named her one of the 100 most influential people in the world. However, for the general public, the name of Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy was on everyone’s lips when in April of last year the president of Lucasfilm, Kathleen Kennedy, announced that the Pakistani director, activist and journalist would be in charge of directing the new film of a new series of three films in the galactic saga started by George Lucas. The first woman to achieve it after male names such as Lucas himself, Richard Marquand, Irvin Kershner, J. J. Abrams or Rian Johnson.
Your mission? That of reliving the story of Rey, played by Daisy Ridley, 15 years after episode 9, The Rise of Skywalker in a plot that follows the protagonist in her quest to rebuild the Jedi Order. The film, still without a definitive title, will hit theaters in 2027. But before getting down to work, Obaid Chinoy dropped by the audiovisual sector conference Integrated Systems Europe (ISE), to talk about a filmography full of painful stories that have managed to change sexist and retrograde laws in their country.
Like those told in the short documentaries Saving Face (2011) or A Girl in the River (2015), for which she won two golden statuettes. In the first she talks about the case of a woman whose husband sprayed acid in her face. A heartbreaking and shocking testimony about a type of aggression suffered by hundreds of women in Pakistan and that shook the Parliament of their country. Just like that of the protagonist of A Girl in the River, an 18-year-old girl who managed to survive after being shot in the face by her father, who immediately put her in a bag and threw her into the river. An honor crime that reflects the fight of that young victim so that no more cases like hers are repeated. “When the film was nominated for an Oscar it received a lot of attention from the Prime Minister of Pakistan. I didn’t imagine it could win, but when I heard my name and accepted the award I said that the Prime Minister would change the law and with my speech I managed to get him to do it” , she explains proudly as she walks from one side of the stage to the other dressed in stark black and showing the audience some fragments of her films on a huge screen.
Hers is a work that was born as a result of an activism that led her to wonder at just 10 years old why she could go to school in Karachi and a girl who begged on the street couldn’t. She couldn’t handle the injustices and at 17 she started writing investigative articles that she sent to local newspapers. For one of them she received threats. “My father always told me: ‘If you tell the truth I will be with you and the rest of the world too.'” Young Sharmeen wanted to study in the United States, although her parents were not in the mood. “I started a 24-hour hunger strike when I was 18 and in the end they gave me permission,” she recalls with a mischievous laugh.
He studied Economics in Massachusetts and upon returning to Pakistan he felt the need to tell stories that disturbed him about people who suffered and had no voice. He traveled to war zones as a freelance journalist in Syria, Afghanistan and Timor. “I didn’t know how to make a film, so I came back to the United States and wrote to various organizations asking for funding,” she recalls. Most denied him the money to make Terror’s Children, about Afghan refugee children in Pakistan. “In times of darkness I saw humanity and I firmly believe that these stories can change the world.” She was knocking on doors for a while until The New York Times became interested in his project.
With scholarship athletes, he had the complicity of LeBron James to denounce the goings-on behind college athletes who generate billions of dollars without being paid. And she ventured into animation with Sitara to tell the dreams of a teenager who wants to be a pilot without knowing that her father wants to marry her to an older man. Her courage and her desire to achieve empathy with her work reached higher levels when she wrote to Marvel Studios to propose the Ms. Marvel project, a series where the first Muslim superheroine appears in a company production.
And, without mentioning his long-awaited collaboration with Disney in the Star Wars saga, Obaid-Chinoy has made it clear that he is going for it and there is nothing that can resist him. “35 years ago I didn’t imagine that I would receive multiple awards and direct films for some of the biggest studios. No one told me that I couldn’t dream big and that I shouldn’t take no for an answer. If someone told me no, “I convinced myself that I could transform it into a yes. And I will take care of always keeping the doors open that were closed to me. At a time when telling the truth is extremely difficult, I know that as a filmmaker, building empathy is the key.” . There is certainly anticipation for his feminist Star Wars.
