Documentary filmmaker Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy has become the first Pakistani to win an Oscar ever. Her short film ‘Saving Face’ looks at the issue of acid attacks on women in Pakistan.

Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy became the first Pakistani to ever win an Oscar on Sunday. She and her American co-director Daniel Junge won the coveted prize for Best Documentary (Short Subject) for “Saving Face.”

The documentary chronicles the lives of two acid attack survivors, Zakia and Rukhsana, and the arduous task to bring their assailants to justice. It also focuses on the work of British-Pakistani plastic surgeon Mohammad Jawad, who moved to Pakistan to help restore the faces and lives of acid attack survivors.

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Ayesha Hasan, a young woman reporter from Pakistan, wants to be taken seriously in her profession, which is dominated by males in her country. Hasan is being sponsored by the Friedrich Ebert Foundation and is currently doing an internship at the Deutsche Welle. She speaks to DW’s Martina Bertram about her future plans.

DW: Pakistan is an Islamic republic. How difficult is it to write about religious themes?

Ayesha Hasan: It is very difficult. One can actually write about all possible issues, lifestyle, celebrities and health. But religion in Pakistan affects all social spheres. If you report on issues like violence

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While some Pakistanis are enraged by model and actress Veena Malik’s semi-nude photo shoot for an Indian magazine, others feel the criticism is proof of double-standards in Pakistani society. Veena Malik poses semi-nude on the Indian FHM magazine cover wearing an ISI tattoo on her left shoulder. That is more than enough to enrage a large part of the Pakistani population.

The Pakistani Army’s spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), is considered a holy cow in Pakistan but maligned in neighboring India for allegedly supporting militant Islamists, including Lashkar-e-Taiba, which New Delhi accuses of orchestrating several terrorist attacks. Western nations also claim the ISI backs the Taliban.

Malik told a private Pakistani news channel, Geo TV, that she wore the ISI tattoo in the shoot for fun. In her defense, Malik claims some of her photos in the popular Indian lifestyle magazine were morphed, however she does not deny doing “bold” shoots for the magazine. She recently

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Pakistan is experiencing a rapid increase in the number of women joining its workforce. But the country is grappling with physical, psychological and sexual harassment of women in the workplace.

Afsheen*, an air hostess with the Pakistan International Airlines (PIA), recalls when she was selected to work with the airline company. She was briefed on how to keep passengers satisfied, but the introductory training did not include any clues on how to keep the pilots “happy.”

A few months later, the pilots called her and her colleagues to go to the cockpit. “They would touch us on the back and the chest intentionally, and pretend it was a mistake,” she remembers. Things got worse when pilots started demanding sexual favours during flights and on the ground, and managed to get some too.

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