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Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy
“If a door hasn’t opened, it’s because you haven’t kicked it hard enough.”
October 2018—Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy, Academy Award-winning documentary filmmaker, shared her powerful stories and film excerpts with Grade 6-12 students.
“Truth is worth fighting for,” says the Pakistani activist, who is making a difference in the fight for women’s equality.
She began writing for newspapers when she was 14. After studying economics and political science at Smith College in Massachusetts, she set out to highlight the inequalities of women and children, pitching her first documentary about Afghan refugee children in Pakistan. Despite multiple rejections, she never gave up.
Since then, she’s made more than two dozen films on topics such as women’s access to contraception and the Iraq war’s impact on children. Her film Saving Face, about acid attacks on women, earned her first Academy Award.
To reach her most important audience—impoverished, rural women and children—she created Pakistan’s first mobile theatre. Though often threatened for her investigative work, she won’t be silenced: “That’s just part of fighting.”
Watch her entire assembly talk here.
LAND ACKNOWLEDGMENT
We wish to acknowledge this land on which Branksome operates. For thousands of years, it has been the traditional land of the Huron-Wendat, the Seneca, and most recently, the Mississaugas of the Credit River. Today, this meeting place is still the home to many Indigenous peoples from across Turtle Island and we are grateful to have the opportunity to work and go to school on this land.
Setting the new standard for girls' education everywhere takes collective action. From all of us.
