By Umer Nangiana
She had a calling for “visual story-telling” and decided to pursue it. Through this visual language, she aims to remove misunderstandings wherever they exist between people. With the same passion, she picked up her camera six year ago and followed the story of Farah, a three-year-old from Palestine.
Visual language crosses borders and resonates with all audiences, says Farheen Umar Pasha, a Pakistani-American filmmaker who has established her own company, Pasha Films in San Diego, United States.
Farah, a feature length documentary, is Farheen’s second film. Shot over five years in the US and Gaza, Palestine, it tells the story of a girl who survives an Israeli incursion on Gaza in 2009, but loses her mother.
It is a story of a girl finding a new home in the US and a host mother. She develops a bond with her new mother, but then they are separated. Two years later, this host mother decides to travel to Gaza to meet the girl. And she is afraid if the girl would recognise her.
Farheen says the film is not just for a particular audience, it has an international appeal and this is why it moved everyone among a multicultural audience at Al Jazeera International Documentary Film Festival 2015 where it was screened recently.
“It is a film that everyone can watch and relate to. It is not a film that is only for the Arabs or the Muslim world. And this is why even the Americans sitting inside and watching it were crying,” Farheen tells Community.
“I have a particular focus in my films and that is bridging the misunderstandings between the East and the West. Being in America, I see a lot of biases in the media against Muslims, Islam and Middle East and I try to play a bridge in removing them through visual language,” adds the passionate filmmaker.
Farah tells the story of a three-year-old with the same name who loses her mother in the 2009 Israeli incursion on Gaza. The girl survives but suffers third degree burns and is sent to San Diego through an organisation called PCRF that provides free treatment for children.
Farheen came to know of her in San Diego and got involved with the story. Farah had come with her grandmother, but the old lady had to go back due to health issues. Farah then lives with a host family and her host mother Amal.
“The film is about her bond with that family and how she grows close to them before eventually going back to Gaza. Two years after she goes back, I and her host mother travelled to Gaza to meet her,” says Farheen.
“We covered Farah’s life in Gaza. She is now seven years old and the film covers four years of her life since she arrived in San Diego. It also covers the life of the host mother Amal and her own problems because she gets very attached to the child and has to eventually let her go,” says the filmmaker.
In essence the film tells the story of somebody, who takes care of a child, takes her in and through three surgeries. She gets so attached to her that she finds it very hard to let go of the child and let her return to a dangerous place. She has to see her grow up in those same conditions of war.
Farheen has been making films for over a decade. Her first film project was The Women of Islam. It was broadcast in the US on public television. The film was about Muslim women and the concept of hijab in different Muslim societies. America was very focused on Burqa (veil) after 9/11 and there was a lot of negativity around it, says Farheen.
“I showed people what happens in Turkey where hijab is banned and what happens in Iran and that it is more of a cultural and political issue than a religious issue. Holding a degree in MBA, Farheen says she made a complete switch of fields from business to filmmaking because she always had this passion for visual story-telling.
And she started filming the moment she had the feeling and the independent mindset that she can do it. “I took some classes in production and editing back in San Diego. I believe you need some technical skills, but it is not as important as learning how to craft a story,” says the filmmaker.
Being a woman she does not face any particular challenges in pursuing her path, she says. In fact, Farheen, a mother of two, says it makes access in certain cases easy for her as it did in the case of Farah. A male camera person would have found it difficult.
The family in Gaza was very protective and would not want a camera person coming into their home, but when Farheen went to Gaza to meet the family of Farah, she faced no such problem. In the first film, The Women of Islam, she also had to go to refugee camps in Peshawar, Pakistan and they would not let any of the male camera crew in. Here again, Farheen had no problems in accessing the subjects.
Though she says she goes to Pakistan every year, she has not done a specific film about Pakistan because she tries to deal with larger issues than just one country.
Filmmaking, she says, is a long process. It is not a day job. It is a labour of love and you spend a lot of hours on it. In her work, she says she gets support from her family. “I have not given my family a lot of choices frankly. I don’t think women should bother too much about these things; otherwise they would end up doing nothing,” says Farheen.
She has two children and when she was going to Gaza, she recalls, she was a little worried because it was a war zone and she was leaving them. But once there, she was calm again and the visit remained pleasant.
Farheen believes the documentary genre is thriving these days. Beyond what is happening in Middle East, it is growing by leaps and bounds internationally because people want factual filmmaking. They want to see that, she says.
