Daily Times

NEW YORK: Two-time Academy Award winner Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy’s documentary ‘A Girl in the River – The Price of Forgiveness’ has been nominated at the prestigious 38th Annual News & Documentary Emmy Awards, as announced by The National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences in New York.

The documentary has been nominated in three 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 & Outstanding Editing: Documentary & Long Form for ‘Saving Face’ and Outstanding Current Affairs Documentary for her documentary ‘Children of the Taliban’.

“At SOC Films, we hope that our work will spark difficult conversations that eventually lead to a change in mindsets. We have a long way to go with honour killings, which continue to impact the lives of thousands of women across the world. Through our work, we will continue to push the envelope aspiring to leave a more humane world for the next generation. My team and I are honoured to have received three Emmy nominations and aim to bring the statues home,” Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy on her nomination at the Emmys this 2017.

The News & Documentary Emmy Awards will be presented on October 5, at a ceremony at Jazz at Lincoln Centre’s Frederick P Rose Hall in the Time Warner Complex at Columbus Circle in New York City. More than 1,000 television and news media industry executives, news and documentary producers and journalists, will attend the event. Awards will be presented in 49 categories. The 38th Annual News & Documentary Emmy Awards honours programming distributed during the calendar year 2016.

The Oscar winning SOC Films & Home Box Office production film A Girl in the River – The Price of Forgiveness’, is based on the practice of honour killing in Pakistan. The documentary chronicles one young Pakistani woman who lived to tell of her escape from an attempted honour 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 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 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 as one of the ambassadors of the Violence against Women Centre. In January 2017, Sharmeen was the first artist ever to Co-Chair the 47th World Economic Forum Annual Meeting in Switzerland.

Published in Daily Times, July 28^th , 2017.