Cinema: Films made by women screen writers, directors, and producers in Islamic cultures: Commercial films: Pakistan

This entry examines multilingual commercial films by Pakistani women screen writers, directors, and producers. Set against the backdrop of Pakistan’s political inconsistency — the problems of migration and rehabilitation, East-West polity issues, and sovereign changes, the entry points to over three hundred commercial films that some eighty women producers and directors have made in Pakistan over the past seventy years. Starting with Saeeda Bano (Swaran Lata) as the producer of the first Pakistani Punjabi feature film Pheray (Marriage; Majeed 1949), and Noor Jehan as the first woman director of a Punjabi film Chanvay (Dearest; 1951), bilingual or trilingual women filmmakers have consistently made Urdu, Punjabi. and Pashto films while the Sindhi cinema has declined. Women made romantic musicals or mixed genres — romantic with social, fiction, fantasy, folklore, crime or history whose renditions cover Sindhi folklores, Pashto film crimes, Punjabi liberalism, and Urdu traditionalism. The entry finds that women made Sindhi films a decade and a half before making Pashto films. The women from Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KPK) did well under the successive regimes of Yahya, Bhutto and Zia, but it was actually during Zia’s period (of the so-called Islamization and terrorization) that eight out of a total of fifteen women filmmakers of Pashto films joined the silver screen, denying the social reality of the real (faceless) women of KPK through women who are open with their emotions, gaze, and sexuality in films. The article examines women’s identity and gaze issues in Amrita Pritam, Maya Devi, and Rukhsana Noor’s textual contributions to Pakistani commercial films and the musicals of Saeeda Bano, Salma Mumtaz, Noor Jehan, Shamim Ara and Sangeeta.