I've talked at length about how the Pakistani film industry has always suffered from limited resources, lack of funding, and insufficient training for newcomers, but time and again, a short film has proven that Lollywood can shine through, no matter the challenges.
Dawn Images reported that Kamran Faiq's short film The Last Glance has officially qualified for the 2028 Academy Awards after earning a Jury Award for Best Short at the 21st Tasveer Film Festival. The festival was held from October 13 to 18.
The film also managed to take home the Best International Short Film award at the Mosaic International South Asian Film Festival in Canada. According to Faiq, it is the "only film" that has successfully qualified in the short film category, but he went on to clarify that this is "not a nomination" and the film has only qualified at the moment.
The plot centers around a family's desperate nighttime flight from their village in an attempt to escape violence. The cast includes Adnan Shah Tipu, Areej Ayub, and Fahad Hashmi, among others. Written and directed by Faiq, the film is produced by Umer Peerzada and executive produced by Khalid Saeed Khan.
Qualifying for Oscars and getting recognition at international film festivals has always been a ray of hope for the Pakistani industry amidst the struggles, as well as audiences. It shows the eligibility of the region's talent to reach global audiences and make way for thousands of submissions when things get blurry in the local industry.
Without any heavy budget, the 13-minute short film deems it as its accomplishment to enter the first pool for official Academy nomination voting. The international arena prioritizes raw talent without looking at the backgrounds or lavish budgets that go into a project. It is this outlook that has helped the local filmmakers build cross-border relationships and revise their festival strategies.
A need for understanding the difference between "Oscar-qualifying" and "Oscar-nominated" remains, though. Oscar-qualifying means that a film meets the baseline criteria and fulfills the exhibition standards to enter the Oscar competition, whereas Oscar-nominated films are those that have passed the voting rounds and secured one of the five spots for the official ballot and the final award.
With not many recent developments in this direction, Pakistan does have examples where it has celebrated individual success by receiving Oscars. Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy's documentary won an Oscar in 2012 and 2016. Even if I set aside the fact that the country does not submit its Oscar entry each year on a regular basis, as was missed last year, the country's willingness to face cutthroat international competition in order to merely reach the multi-tier process of the Academy is undeniable.
It is further beyond doubt that Pakistan is ready to take risks, even with budget constraints, as the latest documentary, Mohammad Ali Naqvi's Hanging By a Wire, is the first-ever documentary feature to be officially selected for the Best International Feature category at the 2027 Oscars. It should be noted that The Last Glance is "qualified" for the "2028" Oscars, while Hanging By a Wire is "selected" for the "2027" Oscars. Neither of them is "nominated" as yet.
Securing a special position among the eight other films in the festival and among the master longlist of 200 films is an achievement in itself. Even a small step towards the Oscars race is celebrated as a major milestone since Pakistani independent films have long struggled for distribution and global visibility.
Months of screenings and weeks of promotional outreach are what it takes for a single film to get the international recognition that it deserves in Pakistan. Stringent domestic and structural barriers are inevitable, even if the number of screens available at local multiplexes is counted as just one of the thousands of challenges. Local indie films find local exposure absent, which obviously gives them an iconic excuse to break into some bhangra when they take the first step on the steep climbing stairs to the final Oscar nominations.
Echoes is an opinion column on film and television from the perspective of a writer based in Pakistan.