‘Last Mohanas’: Jackson Wild award-winning film immortalizes Pakistan’s last boat-dwellers
ISLAMABAD: Jawad Sharif, 38, spent five years documenting the lives of a Pakistani fisherfolk community living on boats in Manchar Lake in the southern Sindh province.
But he never expected that his film, Moklani – The Last Mohanas, shot with a seven-member crew, would go on to win the prestigious Jackson Wild Media Award in the United States.
Moklani won the Best Film award in the Global Voices category at the ceremony held in Wyoming on Oct. 3, making Sharif the first Pakistani filmmaker to receive an often described as the “Oscars for nature filmmaking.”
“The story of the Mohanas fascinated me,” Sharif told Arab News on the sidelines of the film’s trailer launch in Islamabad. “Their existence is a living piece of our history. They are the last community still living on boats [in Pakistan], their lives tied entirely to the water. But that way of life is dying.”
