First couple of days in Karachi

Hello everybody, So my first 3 days in Karachi where really wonderful. Planning the filming schedule, meeting lots of people and places. So even i'm not yet shooting interviews and other events it's already quite busy. On Friday i went to a play at the Art council in Karachi. The play is based on the story of 1001 nights but adapted to themes that are important today, especially focussing on improving and discussing woman-rights. The group that performed are doing some really good and brave work in Pakistan. Al of there plays are around woman issues and they travel through the rural areas of country to perform and through there cultural work opening ways for discussing this issue. You can imaging that this sometimes brings some confrontation with old conservative ideas.

On saturday i had a busy day starting at the Karachi University to see Amar's movie about the Thar-dessert. A beautiful portrait about the diversity and landscape of the area and the different groups living there in extremely basic conditions. After the movie and some chats with people.

After that i went with Yasir, Nameera and Atteqa to a 3 hour interactive workshop about Iqbal. Khurram Ali Shafique author of The Republic of Rumi: A Novel of Reality, Did the workshop mostly in english so i could follow the workshop also. The workshop was about interesting views from sufism combing it to arts & literature discussing individual ego and collective ego and connecting this to the pakistani situation historically & now. So following in this sufism thoughts in the night we went to a concert of Qavvaali Ka Safar featuring Fareed Ayaz & Brothers in the Indus valley organized by T2F.

So sunday was there to relax and we went to the beach with a part of Atteqa's family. A nice day of swimming, talking and eating (everything in this country is around eating .. so i wonder with how many more kilo's i will come back :).

Today will be the first day of shooting, this midday at around 16.00 there will be a Mauj Collective meeting to arrange al the things that will happen the coming weeks: Sahnaakth festival, art critics workshop with Rob van Kranenburg, a workshop in Goethe institute the 7th of April around new media & activism where also our (me and Mark Kulsdom's) documentary will be shown (We Will Block You) and besides this many other things will be coming, but tell you later more on that.