Sabiha Sumar’s Khamosh Pani

Sabiha Sumar's Khamosh Pani

The open spaces in the Pakistani villages were packed. People were sitting in trees and on rooftops. In a nation that barely has a film industry, director Sabiha Sumar's travelling cinema was both a novelty and a flashpoint.

What Sumar showed in 41 villages throughout Pakistan earlier this year was her new feature film Khamosh Pani (Silent Waters), which depicts how religious fundamentalism -- in this case, both Muslim and Sikh -- can destroy families.

"And it has been -- I don't know how to explain it -- more than an amazing response," Sumar says. "Women have come forward and said, 'This is really my story that you've told and I want the world to see it, and I want the world to know what I've gone through.' . . .Young men have come out and talked about their experiences and how they didn't really want to be part of an extremist group, but they really didn't have a choice."

The film takes place in a village in 1979 in the Punjab, with flashes back to the partition of the region in 1947, which caused mass violence and even the killing of women by their own families to avoid being abducted by men from the other side.

Sumar, who studied at Sarah Lawrence College in New York in the early 1980s and is primarily known as a documentary maker in Pakistan, explains that her movie is intended for Pakistani audiences. But the story of how fundamentalism wrenches families and communities is universal.

When the film played at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland, a viewer told Sumar that she identified with the central tragic character of the mother who watches her son become a fundamentalist. The woman's own son had become a neo-Nazi and, as in the film, she felt threatened by her child.

Whether it's the thousands of villagers who watched the movie at her travelling cinema in Pakistan, or a filmgoer in an entirely foreign land, Sumar says, "I think people have responded from that deep fear that really is part of our lives today."