Born in Pakistan in 1978, Sharmeen Obaid is a journalist and a documentary
filmmaker. Her first film 'Terror's Children' premiered on the launch night of t
he Disvoery Times Channel, and has been screened at several film festivals. Herfilms examine the political, social, and religious life in Pakistan.
Sharmeen Obaid was the first woman in her Pakistani family to receive a Western education. Obaid graduated from Smith College with a bachelor of arts (honors) in economics and government and then went to complete two master's degrees from Stanford University in International Policy Studies and Communication.
As a student at Smith College, Obaid was politically and journalistically active, lecturing, and writing for publications such as The Philadelphia Inquirer, T
he Coast (a Canadian weekly) and several Pakistani newspapers.
Sharmeen Obaid's own website has details of her films.
- Newsclips
- Between Pakistan and the world. Laila Kazmi interviews Sharmeen Obaid at opendemocracy.org
- Interview at Asia Source
- SharmeenObaid's elegaic code. An article by Pradip Biswas at screenindia.com
- On a
Razor's edge. PBS interview.
- Sharmeen Obaid's articles in the Cardinal Inquirer (a publication of the Stanford Graduate Program in Journalism)
- Pakistan is not ready for democracy yet. Rediff interview.
Filmography
- Re-Inventing the Taliban
(2004, 54 mins)
brings a uniquely personal perspective to the disturbing rise of radical Islamic fundamentalism within Pakistan. It follows Sharmeen Obaid, a young Pakistani woman, as she travels into North West Pakistan. Her journey to find out what is going on has resulted in a portrait of people and places rarely seen in the Western media – people on both sides of a struggle now unfolding within Pakista
- On a Razor's Edge
(2004, 24 mins)
. A train is now allowed to cross the India-Pakistan border, and FRONTLINE/World correspondent Sharmeen Obaid boards this "peace train" in India and travels home to Pakistan to see how people are reacting to the cautious attempts to settle differences between the two countries.
- Terror's Children
(2003, 45 mins)
For ten weeks in the summer of 2002, Sharmeen Obaid followed the lives of eight Afghan refugee children in the city of Karachi, who had been forced to flee their war ravaged homes in Afghanistan, often alone, to face hunger, disease, illiteracy, servitude and even forced militancy.
