Silent Waters DVD – Sarfaraz Ansari , Salman Shahid

This debut feature by Pakistani filmmaker Sabiha Sumar offers a rare perspective of the polituical evolution of Pakistan, the advent of fundamentalism and the fragile rights of ordinary women. In the hot summer of 1979, widow Ayesha (Kirron Kher) lives with her 18-year-old son Saleem (Aamir Malik) in the Punjabi village of Charkhi near the Indian border, still haunted by the horrors of the Partition. When General Zia comes to power, and two strangers arrive in the village from Lahore preaching revolutionary Islamic values, Saleem and the other young men in the village become caught up in an Islamic fervour that intensifies when Sikh pilgrims arrive from India to worship at the local shrine. Tensions escalate into violence – and the quiet, harmonious lives of Ayesha and her fellow villagers are changed forever.

Pakistan 1979. Saleem (Aamir Malik) is an aimless youth in love with local beauty Zubeida (Shilpa Shukla) and adored by his widowed mother Ayesha (Kiron Kher). Life seems to flow in measured bucolic beauty but old and new trauma looms because of a pair of fundamentalist Muslim insurgents staying in the village. Their zealotry ignites a macho spark in Saleem and soon he is rejecting his mother for her Sufi philosophy and Zubeida for seeing him outside of wedlock. Things get even