Chris Eley is the director of City of Fear
Chris writes:
It is surprising how little we hear about what is happening at the moment in Pakistan from the mouths of Pakistanis.
We hear brief news reports detailing terrorist attacks from the region with numbing regularity but is rare that we stop to consider what those attacks mean for those caught up in them.
As I write this, for example, another 20 people, many of them police officers, have just been murdered in a suicide attack in the Pakistani city of Karachi. Just last week 68 worshippers were killed as a mosque was bombed in the country's North West.
The news is incessant. It is all too easy to switch ourselves off to it. In the three years up to November 2010, the number of deaths in terrorism-related incidents in Pakistan has leapt to over 25,000. This number continues rising almost everyday.
One of the characters in our film, Tahir, says that compared to what is happening in his own country 'people in the West know nothing about terrorism'. His point is about the scale of the problem they face.
He is not denying that there are victims of terrorism in the West: there certainly are, as the moving testimony coming out of the 7/7 inquiry reminds us only too clearly. Tahir's point is that Pakistan's current situation sees horrific stories like those in the 7/7 inquiry being generated many hundreds of times a year.
They are hard statistics to get your head around. It is harder still to try and connect people to all those numbers. Our film, City of Fear, attempts, in a small way, to make this connection for a British audience by telling the stories of some of the ordinary residents and police of Pakistan's capital, Islamabad.
Obviously, the tragedy of terrorism in Pakistan is not confined to Islamabad. It is happening across the country in other large cities like Lahore and Karachi, and especially in Peshawar and the country's volatile North West. Tragically, in many of the worst affected areas the terrorist threat simply adds to, and compounds, an array of other existing problems facing the population, from grinding poverty to natural disaster.
By focusing on the capital, though, the film gives us as Brits the chance to connect and relate to what is going on a little bit more easily. By Pakistani standards Islamabad is a reasonably well-off city and it is comparatively western in its outlook; in other words much more like us in the UK.
To say Islamabad is a City of Fear is not to suggest that it is the most dangerous place in Pakistan. Clearly it is not. In a real sense, however, the place is defined by the potential of an attack on a major target there – the consequences of which would be huge. The stakes are high, especially for the local police force.
Nor is the notion of a City of Fear meant to suggest a place where everyone is afraid. To the contrary, the most common characteristic we met with in making the film was astounding stoicism and resilience. Nevertheless, the fact that Pakistanis are beginning to view acts of terror as an almost normal part of life is a problem in itself.
We should be thankful in Britain that at the moment this is not something we live with everyday, but at the same time we should not close our eyes to an unfolding tragedy happening elsewhere, especially somewhere as interconnected with the UK as Pakistan. I hope that our film contributes to this wider understanding in some small way.
