The Women International Film Festival (WIFF) was founded by Madeeha Raza to represent the women of not only Pakistan, but all over the world. The main idea behind it was to show the world the problems women face and the struggles they make. Pakistan National Council of the Arts (PNCA) recently hosted five-day WIFF 2019. The festival got more than 1000 entries from not only Pakistan but Iran, India, Spain, Italy, France, and even the United States. European Union Ambassador Jean-Francois Cautain was the chief guest at the festival. He was very impressed by the quality of the short films and said, “Clearly a number of the stories reflected in the movies are more than sad. We read these stories of aggression in reports. There is a lot of work to do.”

The Film Festival awarded the top prize to Swedish filmmaker, Alexe Landgren. Alexe is awarded the prize for her short film ‘Till the Sun Comes in the Sky’. The short film shows a four-year-old boy playing with dolls, reflecting his parents’ relationship, while a quarrel escalates between them.

After winning the prize Alexe addressed the audience at the festival through a video message. She said, “I’m especially glad because it is a feminist film festival. I live in Sweden, which is one of the top five countries on the list of equality even though Sweden is not equal. We still have rape and violence against women, women are paid less, they are unrepresented in media and have a hard time reaching top positions in society. On the same list, Pakistan is in the bottom three. Perhaps it can be compared to Sweden a couple of hundred years ago. It’s not an easy struggle but it is necessary. Everyone will gain from not suppressing half our population.”

While addressing the audience Madeeha Raza said, “One of the main focuses of the festival is to shift the narrative pertaining to women in order to combat gender inequality. With mainstream entertainment regurgitating the same old biases about the roles and behaviors of women, it is imperative that the representation of women goes beyond the normative roles defined by the social-historical context of the society.”

The first and second runner up at the festival were India’s Vaishnavi Sundar, and Sweden’s Begonia Randhav respectively.