When Moklani - The Last Mohanas won Pakistan’s first-ever award at the Jackson Wild Media Awards in Wyoming this month, the headlines were predictable: “Pakistani documentary wins global accolade.” The tone was celebratory, the ownership instant. Yet beneath the applause lies an uncomfortable truth: Moklani was produced pro bono by independent filmmaker Jawad Sharif, without a rupee of government funding or backing from the country’s commercial media industry.
Sharif’s work stands apart because it gives voice to people and struggles that Pakistan’s mainstream media prefers to ignore. His lens is not drawn to scenic landscapes or patriotic clichés but to lives balanced on the edge of survival. His films trace the hidden wounds of a society in denial. Moklani - The Last Mohanas mourns the vanishing floating civilisation of Manchar Lake; Bhashaili (Adrift) follows Karachi’s stateless Pakistani Bengalis fighting for recognition; Indus Blues captures the dying echoes of traditional music and the artisans struggling to preserve it; Cham Cham chronicles a transgender activist’s defiant pursuit of dignity; The Losing Side confronts the trauma of intimidation and religious conversions; The Colour of Smog turns Lahore’s pollution crisis into visual protest; and Natari reveals the human cost of climate migration in the Indus Delta.
His acclaimed K2 and the Invisible Footmen honours the unsung porters who make possible the conquest of Earth’s most unforgiving peaks, while Handmade Pakistan (in production) celebrates the country’s fading craft traditions and the artisans who keep them alive. Through Climate Kahani, a digital awareness platform, Sharif extends his storytelling into activism, using visual language to show how climate change is reshaping lives, livelihoods and conflicts. Together, these works form not just a filmography but a quiet rebellion, a record of endurance and erasure from the margins of Pakistan.
Yet the country’s television ecosystem has little space for such work. The commercial entertainment industry is saturated with formulaic dramas and talk shows, while PTV, the state broadcaster, treats documentaries as bureaucratic obligations rather than creative ventures. The only private channel to brand itself around documentaries, Discover Pakistan, limits itself to travel and scenic beauty, avoiding the social and environmental crises that Sharif so often confronts.
The result is a structural silence. Pakistan lacks any institutional facility for independent documentary filmmaking: no commissioning editors, no public grants, no dedicated broadcast slots. Filmmakers like Sharif work on the fringes, sustained by occasional international collaborations such as with the National Geographic Society, which supported Moklani. Yet, when such projects earn global acclaim, the same state and media that offered no support rush to claim credit, celebrating “Pakistani excellence” that their own neglect helped suppress.
There is a difference between recognition and support. Recognition arrives at the airport, garland in hand, when the work is done. Support begins in the trenches
This pattern extends well beyond the arts. Pakistan’s javelin thrower, Arshad Nadeem, trained for years without proper facilities or coaching, yet went on to win gold at the Commonwealth Games and silver at the Paris Olympics. Samina Baig, the first Pakistani woman to summit Mount Everest, financed her expeditions long before the government invited her for photo opportunities. Muhammad Yousaf, the 1994 world snooker champion, emerged from Lahore’s billiard halls, uncoached and unsponsored. Even in science, Dr Nergis Mavalvala’s contribution to the detection of gravitational waves was celebrated globally long before she was “discovered” as a Pakistani role model.
In 2019, a youth football team from Lyari, Karachi’s impoverished yet football-obsessed neighbourhood, returned home victorious after winning the Under-19 Qatar Football Tournament, defeating the renowned Aspire Club in the final. Only after their triumph did the Sindh government take notice, announcing cash prizes and promising a football pitch that was never built. Much like Sharif’s self-financed documentaries, the Lyari players had trained, travelled and triumphed without institutional backing.
Across disciplines, the story repeats: talent struggles in isolation, then is embraced the moment it earns applause abroad. In that sense, Moklani’s international success is not an exception but a mirror, reflecting the contradictions of Pakistan’s cultural and institutional priorities.
There is a difference between recognition and support. Recognition arrives at the airport, garland in hand, when the work is done. Support begins in the trenches, when an athlete trains without shoes, a filmmaker edits without electricity, or a scientist seeks funding without a pedigree. Pakistan remains far better at the former than the latter.
The deeper cost of this neglect is not just personal frustration but the slow erosion of public imagination. When serious documentary films find no screen time, when art survives only on foreign grants, when sports infrastructure collapses into tokenism, the country’s own stories fade into silence. We begin to see ourselves only through reflections of global validation.
The price of that neglect is visible in the collapse of Lollywood, once a thriving national cinema. Suffocated by censorship, intolerance and misplaced priorities, it shrank into a narrow corridor of shallow entertainment. Writers, journalists and filmmakers who sought to confront uncomfortable truths were systematically silenced. Even the much-touted “soft image” campaign under President Musharraf proved little more than a cosmetic façade, not an attempt to enlighten society but a public relations exercise to reassure Western allies during the “war on terror.” It was never a sincere effort to empower artists or restore creative freedom.
Against this backdrop, Jawad Sharif’s persistence, producing documentaries that illuminate human struggle, loss and resilience, stands as an act of courage. His work deserves support not merely as a creative achievement but as a social intervention, bringing visibility to the voiceless and dignity to the disregarded. When such stories are ignored, the vacuum is filled by resentment, alienation and eventually extremism, a malaise that has long haunted Pakistani society.
Moklani: The Last Mohanas fully deserves its international recognition, but its deeper value lies in a reminder: storytelling, like survival, demands persistence even without support. The real challenge for Pakistan is not to celebrate isolated successes but to build systems that make such successes possible and sustainable. True national pride will come not when the world discovers our hidden talent, but when we stop hiding it from ourselves.