Model Zara Peerzada recently took to her Instagram Stories to share a touching tribute to the World Performing Arts Festival that were organized by her family through the Rafi Peer Theatre in Lahore.
The model visited the Alhamra Arts Complex, which served as the venue for the festival, for a photoshoot, and was flooded with all the memories of the festival where she spent her childhood years. She shared a photo of her outside the complex along with the caption, “Feeling very emotional this morning as I’m shooting somewhere I spent my whole childhood.”
Zara explained for the uninitiated that her family, which owns and runs the Rafi Peer Theatre, used to host the World Performing Arts Festival at the Alhamra Cultural Complex every year, from 1947 up till 2008 when a bomb blast took place at the festival.
She shared images from the festival various iterations; of fire-breathers, and puppeteers and musicians and actors.
One Instagram user replied to her story asking her to ask her family to please start the festival again, to which Zara replied with a counter-request, saying “Please start funding art and culture. Please ask our government to pay attention to art and culture,” ending with a call to pay attention to the regression the country has experienced in the past decade.
Zara’s cousin, comedian Shcheherzade Peerzada reshared Zara’s stories and added, “The festivals our family did took a lot of tears, blood, sweat and hard work […] and a hell of a lot of courage.”
