Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy has always been a bit of a warrior. I'm going to avoid the term risk-taker, because it's just too weak and colloquial, even too easy, to call her that. It's also inaccurate, for Sharmeen doesn't take risks based on neat matrices of cost-benefit analyses like others do.
Rather, her processes are more instinctive. For one, Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy simply delivers: on goals, on projects, on ideas. One after the other...Frequently and within hours...Several times a day...For hundreds of days a year. Perhaps most crucially, she delivers consistently and with constantly escalating standards. For the twenty-one years that at least I've known her, the only thing consistent about Sharmeen is her almost stubborn consistency. Everything else may be subject to change, deletion, dynamism or even evolution. But, Sharmeen is almost martial in her valour to deliver. Thus, a reclusive Spartan, she is not. Amazonian Wonder Woman?
It's also inaccurate to call Sharmeen a trailblazer. After all, documentaries, even shorts, were made in Pakistan before Saving Face. But although Oscar glory is glorious, it takes more than filmmaking talents and fine editing to take one home.
Besides finding the right co-director, the right subject, the right distributor, the right team, the right PR and the right topic, Sharmeen also knew the secret Oscar formula: Everything - down to handing George Clooney and Brad Pitt copies of Saving Face during an impromptu encounter - matters. Even your speech matters. And even your Vanity Fair photo-session after the speech matters.
Thus, whether for new fans, ardent admirers or those who've seen her evolve from a not-too-shy 7th grader, to an overachieving house-captain in high school, to a just-over-average writer in college, to Pakistan's powerhouse filmmaking icon today, Sharmeen is thus a critical case study in self-improvement.
Naturally, her work has evolved. Since her first documentary, Terror's Children, in 2001-2 - which the highbrow literati circuit here called 'contrived' and, in a post-9/11 Pakistan, the perfect example of 'selling out' with an anti-Pak narrative - Obaid-Chinoy has editorially and methodologically come a long way as a producer. But ten years and over a dozen films later, even after the 84th Academy Award for Best Documentary-Short went to a Pakistani, her critics stand their ground. While the subject, highlighting the plight of thousands of Pakistani women and still lingering on in millions of nightmares in this broken and burnt country, as well as the portrayal of the achievements of another Pakistani hero (a plastic surgeon called Dr Muhammad Jawad who not many people in even this country knew much about till yesterday) are socially relevant and thoroughly more responsible and focused than the other non-fiction or fiction media that is emerging from this country, the haters still endured. Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, they claimed, was simply a hack.
This bifurcation is perhaps the tragedy as well as the triumph of the Obaid-Chinoy story. Even though her film hasn't been released, her local detractors have already passed judgement on it while the Academy of Motion Pictures has voted it a winner. As social and broadcast media, and especially women, erupted in pride for her yesterday, there was also a dark school of bashers who slammed her for her 'foreign passports', her 'liberal fascism' and her 'well heeled western elitism'.
But today, none of that should matter, not to Sharmeen. With a work-life balance that is beyond admirable, even superhuman (for with her schedules, she keeps her baby Amelia and her very entrepreneurial and supportive husband Fahd perhaps partially out of sight but never out of mind), Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy is probably already halfway through her next book-deal or biographical adaptation or media blitz or sting operation or forced detention, or, dare I say, a second Oscar bid. The critics don't count. Not for her. Not today.
So here's to Pakistan's evolution. And also to the Pakistani Woman. And, of course, to one of the most driven human beings I've ever had the privilege of knowing. Although I can't say if Saving Face will save Pakistan or its acid victims or even its documentary industry, what's for certain is that nobody will now be able to deny this poor, divided country a berth at the glitziest show our planet puts out.
That, in it self, is a realisation worth saving, maybe even documenting. Khan is a former Harvard Shorenstein Fellow, an Asia Society Global Young Leader, investigates for print/social media and anchors "Ikhtilaf" on Aaj TV. Twitter @wajskhan, wajkshan@gmail.com