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Reels of dissent: Pushing the celluloid envelope in Pakistan

It isn't easy to survive with radical views in Pakistan, filmmaker Ammar Aziz, whose latest documentary focuses on internally displaced people, tells Gargi Gupta

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Ammar Aziz, 27, is a Pakistani filmmaker and a Communist. That must make him an endangered species, given the news emanating from that country of the fate of leftist radicals there – remember Sabeen Mahmud, the fearless Karachi-based activist who was killed, reportedly said, for having organised a Valentine's Day Rally last year?

It isn't easy to survive with radical views in Pakistan, especially in the last three-four years, says the filmmaker who was in Delhi last week for the screening of his documentary, The Walnut Tree.

This is a documentary set in Jalozai, one of the largest camps for IDPs or internally displaced persons, near Peshawar in Pakistan. Jalozai houses around 39,000 refugees, mostly Pashtuns from North Waziristan on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, where the Pakistan army has been conducting a military operation against the Taliban for many years. Thousands have died in this war, and tens of thousands more have been forced to migrate. But the conditions in these UN-administered refugee camps – Jalozai is one of several – provide little succour. Housed in bare tents in open fields, with little provision for privacy, sanitation or clean water, sparse rations and warm clothing, disease and death is common. Many in the camp suffer from depression.

Baba, the protagonist of Aziz's documentary, is one of them. A retired schoolteacher and a poet, he is desperate to go back to his village home and the walnut tree planted by his grandfather. In the end he runs away, uncaring of the pain he causes to his family, or the danger to his son who sets out to look for him. It's a poignant tale that taps into something universal: the pain of being uprooted. "It is not just about one camp, one village, one family, or one chapter of violence. It is about being displaced, away from your land. Baba's story was not different from the tragic stories of Partition that my grandparents tell," says Aziz, whose ancestors lived in Amritsar.
In 2013, Aziz's crew followed Baba and his family with a video camera for a year, at the end of which they had become so much a part of the family that Baba's daughter-in-law felt comfortable enough to appear before them without her burkha. "It broke many stereotypes that even we living in Lahore too have about Pashtun culture," says Aziz. "But that sort of film, where there are no burkhas, does not sell well in the western market," he adds cynically. "There is something very exotic about these oppressed women."
 

The Walnut Tree is Aziz's first feature film, but he has made several short films, one of which, Rise of the Oppressed, on women workers in the informal sector in Faisalabad who banded together to form a trade union, was screened at the Berlin Film Festival. Aziz's claim to fame, however, rests on his role in the controversial documentary Taqwacore, on 'punk Islam' bands in Pakistan and the US. He was the one who facilitated Canadian director Omar Majeed's shooting in Pakistan, played a small role in it and even arranged screenings – earning a fatwa for his pains. Today he prefers not to speak about that turbulent phase when he had to go underground for a while.

"Earlier if somebody did not approve of your views, they would go to court. Now they simply kill you. Sabeen's case was widely covered in international media, but there are so many that aren't. A few months ago, Rashid Rahman, a human rights activist, was murdered because he was fighting for a professor who was jailed for being blasphemous," he says.

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