Two-Time Academy Award Winner Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy’s documentary, A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness has won the Best Documentary Emmy Award at the prestigious 38th Annual News and Documentary Emmy® Awards.
The documentary was nominated in 3 categories, the most for any HBO production this 2017: Best Documentary, Outstanding Short Documentary and Outstanding Music & Sound. Indeed, her films have previously won three Emmys: Best Documentary and Outstanding Editing: Documentary and Long Form for “Saving Face” and Outstanding Current Affairs Documentary for her documentary “Children of the Taliban”.
“It is an honor for my team to win the Emmy for best documentary! A Girl in the River started a discourse about honor killings in Pakistan but there is a lot of work still to be done and we are committed to continuing our advocacy.” said Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy on winning the Emmy Award for her documentary A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness.
The News & Documentary Emmy Awards were presented on Thursday, October 5th, 2017, at a ceremony at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Frederick P. Rose Hall in the Time Warner Complex at Columbus Circle in New York City. The event was attended by more than 1,000 television and news media industry executives, news and documentary producers and journalists. Awards were presented in 49 categories. The 38th Annual News & Documentary Emmy® Awards honoured programming distributed during the calendar year 2016.
Also on Thursday, 5th October 2017, SOC Films along with Here Be Dragons & WITHIN launched Pakistan’s FIRST series of short Virtual Reality films ‘Look But With Love’. This series of short films takes you on a journey to explore the culture of Pakistan and introduces you to five brave heroes across the country who are transforming their communities. ‘Look But With Love’ is an immersion into a school of dance in rural Pakistan to a musician who is trying to preserve old sounds and instruments to the wells of the desert in Thar where a man is fighting to bring clean water to the slums of Karachi where a doctor is fighting to save the lives of some of the youngest patients to a band of women who are a part of Pakistan’s antiterrorism squad.
The Oscar winning SOC Films and Home Box Office [HBO] production film, A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness, is based on the practice of honor killing in Pakistan. The documentary chronicles one young Pakistani woman who lived to tell of her escape from an attempted honor killing by her own family. The documentary had previously won an Oscar at the 88th Academy Awards and the coveted Alfred I. duPont-Columbia University Award, in 2016 and the Best International Television Award at the 49th Annual Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards in May 2017.
Earlier this year, Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy announced the release of Pakistan’s first Virtual Reality film series, Look But With Love in August 2017. The 5 part documentary series was premiered at the upcoming 55th New York Film Festival [ #NYFF55 ], the inaugural Tribeca TV Festival and the Future of Storytelling. Sharmeen also launched her interactive community engagement project “SOC Outreach” in June 2017. In May 2017, she won the prestigious Knight International Journalism Award 2017 for her global reports for the past two decades. Also in May, Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy won the Best International Television Award at prestigious 49th Annual Robert F. Kennedy Journalism Awards for her Academy Award Winning documentary “A Girl in the River”.
Sharmeen represented Pakistan at the 8th annual Women in the World Summit in April 2017 and launched a new campaign “AAGAHI – Apnay Mustaqbil Ki” in collaboration with the Women’s Action Forum in Karachi on the International’s Women’s Day in March 2017. In February 2017, the Punjab Government’s Strategic Reforms Unit appointed Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy as one of the ambassadors of the Violence against Women Centre (VAWC). In January 2017, Sharmeen was the first artist ever to Co-Chair the 47th World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Switzerland.
