A still from This Stained Dawn depicts a group of women wearing black and red in formation at Aurat March. Behind them, a mostly female audience sits on the grass and watches the performance.
A still from This Stained Dawn depicts a group of women wearing black and red in formation at Aurat March. Behind them, a mostly female audience sits on the grass and watches the performance. Credit: Anam Abbas
Interview

Aurat March, feminism and political organising in Pakistan

A conversation with the filmmaker Anam Abbas, director of the 2021 documentary 'This Stained Dawn'
The Editors

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This is a machine-generated, copy-edited transcript of a Q and A event hosted on Streamyard on 7 April as part of our monthly documentary screening Screen Southasia. It has been edited for brevity and clarity. Listen to the full interview here.

Lydia Smith: Screen Southasia is our monthly film program in partnership with Film Southasia that features documentaries from across the region. This month, we’ve been showing This Stained Dawn, a documentary about the organisers of the Aurat women’s march in Pakistan. 

Today, I have the pleasure of hosting filmmaker Anam Abbas to answer a few questions about the film. This Stained Dawn is Anam’s first feature film, which premiered in international competition at Sheffield DocFest. She has since served as producer and DOP [director of photography] of the feature Showgirls of Pakistan and as producer of In Flames, which premiered at Cannes in 2023. She’s a co-founder of Other Memory Media, one of the founding members of the Documentary Association of Pakistan, and has served as a jury member for Berlinale Doc Station and Sheffield Meet Market. She will be a mentor at the KIMFF Lab in Kathmandu next month. Anam, thank you so much for joining us.

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