Dawn: Sharmeen Obaid Chinoy is a documentary film-maker whose 2012 film about acid violence, Saving Face, made her the first Pakistani to win an Academy Award. This year, she is nominated again for A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness, which tells the story of 19-year-old Saba Qaiser, from the Pakistani province of Punjab, whose father and uncle shot her in the face and threw her in a river because she had married without her family’s consent. Because she had tilted her head at the last minute, Saba survived the shooting and managed to get to a petrol station for help. But although her father and uncle were subsequently arrested, Saba came under pressure to forgive them, which under Pakistani law means they would escape further punishment.

How did you come across Saba’s case?
I wanted to tell a story about “honour” killings, from the perspective of somebody who had survived, because almost always victims of “honour” crime die, and it’s very hard then to tell the story, because you never have the perspective of that person and what they went through. So I was searching for a survivor, and one day I read in the newspaper that a girl had been shot and put in a gunny bag and thrown in a river, and survived, and was in a hospital. So I went off to try and find that hospital.

And obviously you did…
Yes, I found her in hospital – it must have been about two days after she had been shot. We got permission from the hospital, and we spent a lot of time speaking to her; you know, she was very open to telling her story because she believed very strongly that she didn’t want anyone else to go through what she had.

She must have been in a great deal of pain, and shock?
She was. She had this extraordinary kind of will though – this defiant will about her, even on day one. And she just took to filming matter-of-factly, as if she was born for the camera. But she never did anything extra for the camera, she was who she was; and you see that as the film progresses, you see her demeanour, the way she reacts, the way she laughs – it’s all very natural.

More: