Description
Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy grew up in Pakistan, a country that has a lot of rural areas lacking community spaces. When she got older, she became a Pakistani journalist, filmmaker, and CEO of SOC Films, a documentary film company focused on investigative and social justice content. Her production specializes in engaging with the lives of people on the margins to bring awareness of their challenges, struggles, and everyday lives. In 2016, her documentary, “A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness,” won an Oscar. It is a short film about a woman who survived being shot in the face by her father and uncle for marrying someone outside of her caste. Acts of violence against women similar to that are often viewed as “honor killings” and are culturally acceptable in Pakistani law. While this film helped bring awareness to it, Obaid-Chinoy realized that only screening videos in major Pakistani urban centers would do little for those who are actually affected by the issue; people living in remote rural areas of Pakistan.
With this in mind, Obaid-Chinoy started a mobile Cinema Campaign called Dekh Magar Pyaar Sy (Look, But With Love). She transformed the side of a truck to have a projection screen on it that was then used to travel around small villages and towns all over the country. This campaign offered free movie nights to the local communities. They would screen different films, documentaries, movies, and animations about themes related to different social and economic justice issues in the country.
This became not only a mobile cinema, but an educational tool for many more topics, like COVID-19. During the pandemic, they would screen a series of short films and animated films related to the pandemic. In addition to being an educational tool, Mobile Cinema aims at compensating for the lack of community spaces in rural Pakistan. At the same time, it became a platform for other rising filmmakers to show their work, creating awareness about film as an art form.
SOC Mobile Cinema – Dekh Magar Pyaar Se. Video submitted by Khawar Latif Khan.
Connection to Mobile Networked Creativity
This example of Mobile Networked Creativity uses a vehicle and art for social and critical inquiry and intervention. These communities had unequal access to mobility infrastructures due to race, gender, and socioeconomic status. Now they have areas of inclusive mobility. In this new inclusive community space, they were able to reach more people than before and create an avenue to talk about these inequalities. They also created awareness about film as an art form and supported their local artist as they showed their work on these mobile cinemas.
Location
Pakistan
To Learn More
- Image of the Mobile Cinema
- Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, “SOC Films.”
- Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, “SOC Films About us Page.”
- Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, “How film transforms the way we see the world,” TED, (2019).
- Ellie Anzilotti, “This mobile cinema is helping women in Pakistan learn their rights,” Fast Company (2019).
- Images Staff, “Sharmeen Oaid’s New Mobile Cinema Project Takes Films Where People Need Them Most,” Images (2017).
- Lanson, de Souza e Silva, and Hjorth, “Mobile Media Art: An Introduction,” Taylor and Francis Group (2020).
- Mimi Sheller, “Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes,” (London: Verso, 2018).
