Shaheer Ahmed
Last week, the “Best Health Film” prize was given out at the January online version of the Cannes International Film Festival to a Pakistani short film titled “Noor.” The video addresses the shame that is associated with having poor vision.
On Monday, the Cannes International Film Festival revealed the winners of the festival’s online edition for the month of January. This is a relatively new initiative for the festival, in which the jury recognizes films created in a range of categories. Sarwat Gilani, Omair Rana, Tanisha Shameem, Mizna Waqas, and Tasneem Ansari are among the cast members of Noor, which was written by Farah Usman. The principal character of the 17-minute short film is a young performer who is an artist. The principal character of the 17-minute short film is a young performer who is an artist.
According to Umer Adil, who directed Noor, “It [Noor] underlines the impact on youngsters of not wearing glasses and how that pressure affects their personalities.”
The official social media handle for the festival revealed the nominees a week ago, and the Pakistani short film Noor’s name was among the list of those disclosed. In January, the movie was made available on the OTT platform SeePrime in Pakistan.
Sightsavers, a nonprofit organization that helps school-aged children improve their vision and provides free vision screenings and glasses, was the group behind this initiative.
Adil said, “They want to get the word out about bizarre movies.” “Pakistan doesn’t make many films about health, especially about eye tests and eye health.”
The director says that Sightsavers wanted to make a movie about how people think about people with bad eyesight, so that’s how the movie came to be. The organization itself sent the movie to the January Cannes World Film Festival in the health film category.
Adil said that since our film industry is based on stars, we were curious how people would react to a movie starring a child actor. But we heard a lot of good things. At first, we had 100,000 natural views. The comments show that people really liked it. It was a pleasant surprise for the team and the platform.
A Pakistani short film Noor wins at the Cannes World film festival which is indeed a great achievement for the Pakistani film industry.
