[The filmmaker, Sharmeen
Obaid-Chinoy, and the co-director, Daniel Junge, won the Oscar in Los Angeles
on Sunday night for the best short documentary for their film “Saving Face,”
which follows a British plastic surgeon as he tries to repair the horrific
damage done to women who have been attacked with acid, often by jealous or
vindictive husbands.]
By Declan Walsh
ISLAMABAD, Pakistan — Wearily accustomed to being the focus of bad news, Pakistanis
celebrated on Monday after a filmmaker from Karachi won the country’s first
Academy Award, for a documentary about the victims of gruesome acid attacks.
The filmmaker, Sharmeen
Obaid-Chinoy, and the co-director, Daniel Junge, won the Oscar in Los Angeles
on Sunday night for the best short documentary for their film “Saving Face,”
which follows a British plastic surgeon as he tries to repair the horrific
damage done to women who have been attacked with acid, often by jealous or
vindictive husbands.
Prime Minister Yousaf
Raza Gilani led the tributes to Ms. Obaid-Chinoy, 33, saying that she would be
given a “high civil award” for her achievement.
It was the second big
victory for a film produced in the region. The award for best foreign-language
film went to the Iranian movie “A Separation,”
also a first for a country that is often at odds with the West.
Speaking by telephone
from Hollywood, Ms. Obaid-Chinoy said that she was “dazed” by her success. “It
reinforces the fact you can be anyone, come from anywhere and as long as you do
quality work it gets rewarded,” she said.
She said she was
congratulated backstage at the awards ceremony by Angelina Jolie, who has
frequently traveled to Pakistan to highlight the plight of refugees and the
poor.
“Saving Face” focuses on
the efforts of Dr. Mohammad Jawad, a British plastic surgeon who has traveled
across Pakistan to repair the faces of women burned by acid.
In one scene, a weeping
patient tells him that she was attacked by a husband who threw battery acid on
her, a sister-in-law who doused her with gasoline and a mother-in-law who
struck the match that set her on fire. “I cannot understand this,” says Dr.
Jawad, himself straining with tears. About a hundred such attacks are reported
to the police every year, the filmmakers said, although many more go
unreported.
But Ms. Obaid-Chinoy
emphasized that the film also focuses on the courageous lawyers and legislators
who introduced a strict law last year that mandates a sentence of life in
prison for those convicted in acid attacks.
“This is a film about
hope,” she said. “It shows that Pakistan has a problem, but that there are
people on the ground who are tackling it.”
Ms. Obaid-Chinoy, who
previously won an Emmy for a documentary about young Pakistani recruits to the
Taliban, began her career in 2002 with New York Times Television, where she
produced an award-winning documentary about the children of Afghan refugees.
She said that she hoped her Oscar would inspire other Pakistani filmmakers.
“This shows that someone from their ranks can do it,” she said.
Neither the Iranian nor
the Pakistani film celebrated at the Academy Awards was entirely shorn of
political context. In his acceptance speech, Asghar Farhadi, the Iranian writer
and director of “A Separation,” referred to mounting speculation that Israel
was preparing to attack Iran’s nuclear complexes.
“At a time of talk of
war, intimidation and aggression,” he said, Iran had spoken though a “glorious
culture, a rich and ancient culture that has been hidden under the heavy dust
of politics.”
In Pakistan, the Oscar
victory coincided with concern that the government was planning to restrict
free speech through stringent new regulation of the vibrant electronic media,
including a ban on television satires of politicians.
At a news conference in Islamabad,
Information Minister Firdous Ashiq Awan sought to dispel the concerns. No
regulation would be imposed without first consulting the television stations,
she said.
AUSTRALIA PREMIER SURVIVES CHALLENGE FROM HER PARTY
[“This issue, the leadership question, is now determined,” she said at a news conference. “You, the Australian people, rightly expect the government to focus on you — for you to be at the center of everything government does. I can assure you that this political drama is over and now you are back at center stage where you should properly be.”]
By Matt Siegel
SYDNEY,
Australia — Prime Minister Julia
Gillard fended off a
leadership challenge on Monday by her former foreign minister, Kevin Rudd,
handing him a resounding defeat in a vote by members of Parliament from the
governing Labor Party.
After winning an unexpectedly strong 71-to-31 vote, Ms.
Gillard called for the party to turn to the business of governing. But analysts
warned that she had little time to win back Australia’s disaffected electorate
before her lack of popularity hobbled her government and, perhaps, Labor’s
chances in an election scheduled for next year.
Ms. Gillard sought to close the chapter on what has been
described as the country’s most toxic leadership dispute in a generation.
“This issue, the leadership question, is now determined,”
she said at a news conference. “You, the Australian people, rightly expect the
government to focus on you — for you to be at the center of everything
government does. I can assure you that this political drama is over and now you
are back at center stage where you should properly be.”
Mr. Rudd, who was replaced as prime minister by Ms. Gillard
in a 2010 party coup, resigned as foreign minister during a visit to Washington
last week. Ms. Gillard then called the leadership vote to try to end a crisis
that had been prompted by speculation that Mr. Rudd and his supporters were
seeking to oust her.
After the vote, Mr. Rudd acknowledged Ms. Gillard’s victory
and declared it “well past time that these wounds were healed.” Analysts had
estimated that Mr. Rudd needed at least 35 votes to mount another challenge for
the leadership in the short term.
“The caucus has spoken,” Mr. Rudd told reporters. “I accept
the caucus’s verdict without qualification and without rancor.”
Mr. Rudd promised not to initiate another challenge before
the next parliamentary election and tried to strike a conciliatory note with
former colleagues in the cabinet, many of whom had issued stinging personal
attacks against him in recent days.
“To those who have been a little more willing in their
public character analysis of me in recent times, could I say the following: I
bear no grudges, I bear no one any malice, and if I’ve done wrong to anyone in
what I have said or in what I have done to them, I apologize,” he said.
Another challenge to the party leadership by Mr. Rudd is
not out of the question, some analysts said. But the Labor Party’s greater
concern involves consistently low poll numbers since late 2010 for it and Ms.
Gillard.
In a survey released Monday by Newspoll, based on polling
conducted Thursday to Sunday among 1,152 voters, 53 percent supported the
opposition coalition to 47 percent who supported the Labor Party, a
difference that was within the margin of error of plus or minus three percentage
points.
The opposition leader, Tony Abbott, was running even with
Ms. Gillard, with 38 percent saying Mr. Abbott would make the better prime
minister, to 36 percent saying Ms. Gillard would. Mr. Abbott, in Canberra,
dismissed any talk of a rebound for Labor after the vote Monday.
He framed the leadership vote as “not so much a new start
for this prime minister, but merely a stay of execution.”
Perhaps the most ominous result in the survey for Ms.
Gillard was that despite her supporters’ withering attacks on Mr. Rudd,
respondents still preferred him over her as the leader of the Labor Party by
almost two to one: 53 percent to 28 percent.
Despite having won the “most decisive victory we’ve ever
seen in a challenge against a leader in Australia,” said Norman Abjorensen, a
political scientist at Australian National University in Canberra, Ms. Gillard
will have to turn around the poll results within three months to stave off
another challenge from Mr. Rudd.
To do so, Mr. Abjorensen said, Ms. Gillard will have to
showcase her legislative victories, like the introduction of the largest emissions trading program outside the European Union and
the strong economic growth that has occurred on her watch. “The challenge now,
both tactically and strategically for the government, is to try to get the
whole political discussion in Australia back to policy, back to achievements
and back to goals for the future,” Mr. Abjorensen said.
In some circles, however, Ms. Gillard is viewed as unlikely
to emerge with a victory in the next parliamentary election, said Michael
Wesley, executive director of the Lowy Institute for International Policy, an
independent research institute in Sydney. Allies of Australia have begun sizing
Mr. Abbott up as her likely successor, he said.
“If anything, I think this has made Abbott more likely to
come into power, and I think that’s already starting to be factored in,” Mr.
Wesley said. “From what I can tell, the foreign diplomatic community is making
a great effort to get to know Abbott and his foreign policy positions.”
As prime minister, Mr. Rudd developed a reputation for
bullying people and making autocratic decisions, and that reputation still
influences his colleagues’ opinion of him, Mr. Wesley said.
Ms. Gillard’s supporters may dismiss Mr. Rudd’s popularity
with the electorate at their own peril, Mr. Wesley said.
“I think a really quite damaging narrative has opened up in
all of this, and it’s been lost in some of the commentary,” he said, “and
that’s this idea of ‘the candidate of the people versus the candidate of the party,’
and you couldn’t have had a starker difference looking at the polls this
morning and looking at the results of the vote. I think that will be manifest
in the election when it comes.”
