With Sarmad Masud’s debut film, My Pure Land, recently being in the news in Pakistan for the topic it has chosen and for being filmed in Pakistan, it has just been chosen as Britain’s submission for the foreign-language Oscar category according to Variety magazine.
Narrating the story of a mother and her daughters in rural Pakistan who were forced to defend their land from a militia of 200 bandits, the film was officially sent to the Oscar Committee in the UK and has been selected as the first ever Urdu-language film to be selected in Britain for a foreign-language Oscar.
Also read: Here’s why you need to see the first feminist action film based in Pakistan
Shot in the interior regions of Pakistan, the film is a guerrilla style narrative that was shot ‘in difficult conditions’. The production banner described the film as “a violent contemporary Western but grounded in realism and crucially with a feminist theme.â€
My Pure Land was produced by Bill Kenwright, whose credits include Rufus Norris’ Broken, and was premiered at the Edinburgh Film Festival. It will open in the U.K. on Friday.
