Durefishan Saleem recently appeared on BBC Asian Network where she talked about how despite her drama Kaisi Teri Khudgarzi doing superbly well last year, it is not something that resonates with her due to its highly misogynistic themes. In fact, she went on to say how she herself would never watch something like that, but unfortunately, these kind of dramas are the only ones who perform well commercially.
“Kaisi Teri Khudgarzi made the producers or made me more feasible to the choices that I could say yes to. Today if I’m getting 10 scripts and I am not liking 10 of them, I would be getting five more because they would be like ‘Oh, we want her on board.’” she said.
“Dur-e-Fishan would not watch a genre like or would even like to work in something like this again. But Dur-e-Fishan belongs to a kind of society where people really like any woman being saved from any toxic area around,” she added.
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Further talking about her character Mehek, Durefishan pointed out how the local audience loves damsels in distress. “Because our audience is just focused on [how] a girl needs to be saved by a boy. And no matter how that boy saves [her], it’s more [about] how we raise women in our culture,” she said.
“We just tell them that your brother, your father, your husband is supposed to be around you. I feel like when I was reading the script, Dur-e-Fishan would not have acted the way Mehak did because Mehak is a Pakistani girl who has no experience of boys, who was never told that you are good yourself,” she added, reiterating her point.
While some independent creators do work on empowering scripts, it all falls down to how well they’ll perform at the end of the day. “But again, are these types of dramas that will do commercially well? We hope so because it’s all a chain of producers getting their money back. If you’re not giving them the views, no matter how progressive, feminism-driven the drama might be, they won’t be able to make another one, she said.
Watch her interview clip below.
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