Asian festival honors CWS-supported Pakistani documentary

["Lesley Crosson" <lcrosson@churchworldservice.org>]

Asian film festival honors CWS-supported Pakistani “Burning
Paradise” documentary 

NEW YORK - March 23, 2011 -- Global humanitarian agency Church World
Service and its Pakistan partner, media production company the
Interactive Resource Center (IRC), today paid tribute to gifted young
Pakistani filmmaker Nisar Ahmed for his direction of the documentary
“Burning Paradise,” awarded a special jury mention in India’s
Alpaviram 2011 South Asian Short and Documentary Film Festival. 

The Alpaviram festival, hosted February 18-20 by the National Institute
of Design (NID) in Ahmedabad, India, honored the 22-minute documentary
for its courageous depiction of the human cost of conflict in
Pakistan’s Swat Valley in Khyber Pakhtunkhawa province during the
2009 violence that internally displaced more than a million people from
the region. 

 “Burning Paradise,” directed by Nisar, was conceived by Muhammad
Waseem, executive director of the Lahore-based Interactive Resource
Center.  

Nisar, who works with IRC and is from Pakistan’s Gilgit-Baltistan
area, entered another film in the Alpaviram competition, “Cinema
Making Peace.” Ironically, Ahmed and other Pakistani film students
with entries in the festival were denied visas by the Indian government
to attend the event.

Church World Service Pakistan/Afghanistan is partner with IRC in its
innovative new interactive community television network project Maati TV
(http://maati.tv/beta/). “We are extraordinarily pleased that
“Burning Paradise” and Nisar have been so honored, said Maurice
A, Bloem, Church World Service deputy director and head of programs.

“Nisar’s artistic eye is at the same time unblinking and
compassionate,” Bloem said. “He embodies the spirit, courage and
creativity that IRC and Church World Service hope to encourage through
the medium of Maati TV among Pakistani youth and other community
members.”

In a February interview with the Bangalore Mirror about the award,
documentary director Nisar said, “We all were very excited about
attending Alpaviram. But the Indian embassy denied us visa due to
security reasons. We are creative people who wanted to be in India to
experience Indian cinema. 



“We will now have to console ourselves with the fact that our films
were short-listed. We hope Indians will get to know and appreciate our
country through our films. Such festivals are a great platform to
promote peace and cultural diversity.”


“Burning Paradise,” filmed in Pashto and Urdu with English
subtitles, can be seen on Maati TV (in three parts) at:
http://www.maati.tv/beta/burning-paradise/ 

Four documentaries and one fictional film by Pakistan film artists were
screened at Alpaviram 2011, among the 31 finalist fiction and
documentary films selected for the competition, from entries from
Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Sri Lanka and other South-Asian nations. 

A project of IRC, CWS in Pakistan/Afghanistan and South Asian
Partnership Pakistan, the Maati TV channel (Music Art and Technology
Informatrix), engages youth and communities interactively, using
television and videography as a medium to express the issues they face.
Providing training and hand-held video cameras, Maati offers young
correspondents in 20 districts of Pakistan an outlet to produce and
share social and development stories. Maati is now collaborating with
universities in the region.

Supporters of the Maati TV initiative include Church Development
Service (Evangelischer Entwicklungsdienst), an association of the
Protestant Churches in Germany, CMC (Centraal Missie Commissariaat), the
Catholic missionary development organization based in the Netherlands,
and Misereor, the German Catholic Bishops’ Organization for
Development Cooperation.

Although there is currently no television channel in Pakistan to air
documentaries, posting the channel’s news and programs to YouTube
provides a venue potentially for millions, v
ia the Internet.

 ###
Media Contacts:
Lesley Crosson, (212) 870-2676, media@churchworldservice.org 
Jan Dragin - 24/7 - (781) 925-1526, jdragin@gis.net 

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