Emmy Award-Nominated Pakistan Documentary: "Parents of Children with Disabilities Are Compelled, Not Cruel" The same girl we found in chains earlier, lit the torch at the Special Olympics World Games in Berlin, and everyone involved with Special Olympics there knew her story because of the movie. Everyone was there. These are the words of Pakistani filmmaker Ziad Zafar, who worked as an associate producer on the Emmy-nominated documentary As Far as They Can Run. Ziad along with fellow filmmaker Nader Siddiqui. In an exclusive interview with BBC Urdu, he said that the story of his film consists of three mentally challenged children of Sindh who through sports and athletics not only change themselves but also change the thinking of their family and society.

This movie is essentially about love, Ziad claims, and how much a person can change as a result of receiving love or having love shown to them. It should be noted that the documentary film “As Far as They Can Run” from Pakistan has been nominated in the category of "Outstanding Documentary Short" in the annual TV Screen Awards Emmys in America. The director of this film is Iranian-American filmmaker Tanaz. While Pakistani filmmakers Nadir Siddiqui, Ziad Zafar, and Haya Fatima Iqbal played a key role in making this film.

It should be noted that the field producer of this film, Haya Fatima Iqbal, has won Oscars once and Emmy awards twice, while cinematographer Nader Siddiqui has been nominated for an Emmy award once before. Both Nadir Siddiqui and Ziyad Zafar are extremely happy and grateful for the Emmy Award nomination for their film. They said that they started filming the film in 2020 before the outbreak of the Covid epidemic and after years of tireless work. After hard work, they started getting the fruits of it.

"It's a great honor to receive an Emmy Award nomination for the film," Nadir Siddiqui said, his eyes twinkling as he spoke about "Sana", one of the characters featured in his documentary. "The biggest part of the story of our documentary is the transformation of those characters," he said with great emotion and poignancy.

The family of Sana, a girl living in the village of Mirpur Khas, is a poor family. Sadly, she was bound like an animal. I was very surprised and hurt by how this could happen. Nader said that parents of mentally challenged children in rural areas are not cruel but forced. Due to a lack of resources, they do not know how to deal with special children.

After talking to the parents, I realized that they are not bad people. They go to work in their fields. As the girl grows up, she disappears and moves to another village, and it is very difficult to communicate and explain to her Revolution" and said that they are working on disabled children from underprivileged areas across Pakistan.

The work of the Special Olympics had the effect of improving the relationship of Sana and other children with their parents. It is a journey that a girl who was bedridden is today lighting the torch of Special Olympics in front of the world."

Like Sana, Zayad Zafar recounted the transformation of another child Sajawal into a father on camera. He didn't show love to the child." There was a look in the child's eyes on that occasion, although he couldn't even speak and couldn't express his feelings, but at that moment, words were not needed. "His father had a lot of constraints, some debt and he couldn't pay attention to the child at all," Ziyad added.

On the situation of mentally and physically challenged people in Pakistan, Nader's position was that there is a huge lack of awareness about such people in the country and they are considered ineffective. That an opinion should not be formed by seeing a scene.

I noticed that my remote viewing style was also a form of instant opinion. On the first day, I saw that a girl was tied to the bed, so my first thought was how cruel it was. If you talk to these parents for two or three hours, you will understand how forced the parents are, they have the same love in their hearts that a mother or father has for any child, but they are forced.

He said that this year when this film was shortlisted for Oscars and was screened in some big cities of America, people used to ask questions afterwards. "I was always in the test of how to explain to the people of the first world how much poverty makes a person helpless." In the film, we tried to bring out the humanity of these people despite these things."