Afia Nathaniel and Pakistani minor cinema: The Amazon of the screen

Afia Nathaniel is one of the successful and influential female filmmakers, writers, and producers in Pakistani minor cinema, who aims to transform mainstream Pakistani cinema from within. Her first film, Dukhtar (2014) , is a narrative intervention in the patriarchal ideology in Pakistani cinema, which portrays woman as the ‘eternal feminine’. In this chapter, drawing on feminist film studies and motherhood studies, I highlight how Nathaniel’s written, produced, and directed feminist film Dukhtar adopts an oppositional visual discourse against the traditional cinematic mechanisms, or what Laura Mulvey calls ‘traditional exhibitionist roles’, and significantly contributes to ‘women’s cinema’ or what I term ‘Pakistani minor cinema’. Dukhtar – Pakistan’s entry in Oscar’s foreign-language film category, tackles the critical issues of child marriages, women as guardians of family honour and repressive social mores against women. Nathaniel seeks to deflate the myth of ‘fetishistic-scopophilic cinema’ – traditional Pakistan cinema – and destabilize audiences’ actively absorbed preconceived meanings. Apart from the film’s substantial contribution to women’s cinema and global screen culture, Nathaniel’s storyline makes critical theoretical contributions to maternal theory. This study focuses on Nathaniel’s screen story, which problematizes sexual politics by reframing the concept of (m)othering in gender discourse. The film contributes to the existing scholarly discussion on motherhood, mothering, and (m)othering to advance the study of South Asian cinema. In her approach to a woman in cinema, Nathaniel focuses on the need for ‘maternal agency’ to act to resist cultural forces that suppress women.

Keywords: Afia Nathaniel ; Dukhtar ; motherhood ; Pakistani minor cinema