THE ART OF INVISIBILITY

Academy and Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker Haya Fatima Iqbal is using her camera to highlight untold stories and unseen perspectives

For someone who has won global acclaim as an Acad-emy and two-time Emmy Award-winning documentary filmmaker, Haya Fatima Iqbal has in fact perfected the art of invisibility. Her documentaries, sometimes shot in Pakistan’s most backward areas or most conservative communities, require her to blend into her surroundings physically and psychologically. She does this by earning the subjects’ trust, sharing their lives, understanding their challenges and their motivations, and by being respectful of their culture. She may also do this in a more symbolic way: by wearing a dupatta over her head.

“Coming from Karachi, armed with a camera, I appear like a big-city girl to them, a ‘madam’ coming from a position of privilege,” says the 34-year-old co-founder of Documentary Association of Pakistan (DAP), “so the dupatta signifies that I’m from a similar value system, and that I’m not an outsider.” It also has other advantages: as most shoots are done in the blazing daylight, it shields Haya from the sun. “And since I keep my hair short, it lets people know I’m a woman,” she laughs.