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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.”

The word Mohana, meaning fisherfolk in Sindhi, traces its roots to the ancient civilization of Mohenjo-Daro that flourished around 2,500 BCE. The Mohanas, also known as Mir-al-Bahr — “Lords of the Seas” — were once prosperous fishermen who distributed parts of their daily catch among travelers.

Today, their descendants struggle to survive as pollution and climate change transform their ancestral Manchar Lake into a toxic wasteland.

Manchar Lake is Pakistan’s largest natural freshwater lake and lies west of the Indus River in Sindh’s Jamshoro and Dadu districts. Its surface area once swelled from 36 to 500 square kilometers during the monsoon season. But decades of contamination have turned its waters saline.

Since the 1990s, irrigation and drainage projects have diverted effluent into the lake, killing fish and forcing the Mohanas off their boats.

“The disaster began to unfold several decades ago, when the Water and Power Development Authority in 1976 converted the MNVD (Main Nara Valley Drain) from a fresh water stream to a saline water drain pouring agricultural effluent of northern Sindh districts into Manchar Lake,” researcher Naseer Memon wrote in a 2023 article.

A subsequent project, the Right Bank Outfall Drain (RBOD-II), was launched in 2001 to carry wastewater to the sea but has faced repeated delays. The Supreme Court took notice of the contamination in 2011, but no solution has yet emerged.

Arab News reached out to Sindh Irrigation Minister Jam Khan Shoro regarding the RBOD’s current status and its impact on local communities but did not receive a response.

Environmentalists say Manchar’s troubles have been worsened by climate change. Erratic rainfall patterns and extreme weather have forced thousands to migrate from the lake’s shores.

“The shift of the monsoon had caused torrential rainfall in the hills of southern Punjab and Balochistan [in 2022] and the RBOD which was actually to take the agricultural effluent through the Manchur lake and toward the Indus river and from the Indus river on to the sea... its capacity wasn’t enough to be able to drain the water,” said Afia Salam, a leading Pakistani environmentalist.

“The intense rainfall [elsewhere in Sindh] made the water accumulate and not drain out fast enough and that is why in the 2022 floods Manchar lake had to be breached,” she added.

CULTURAL LOSS

Sharif says his film captures not just an environmental tragedy, but a cultural extinction.

“It could be the loss of identity, of a language, or of a tradition. In Moklani, there are multiple reasons this culture is dying; it is literally taking its last breaths,” he said.

Using natural color grading to highlight the haunting beauty of Sindh’s wetlands, Sharif paired visuals with an original soundtrack that mirrors the rhythm of life on water.

“I wanted them to feel it, to feel what it’s like to lose something that has existed for centuries,” he said.

Co-producer Syeda Kashmala, a former lawyer, said the decline of the community is starkly visible.

“Where there were once 40 boats housing dozens of families, now only about 20 remain, as the saline and contaminated water causes faster erosion [of ecosystem],” she said.

The film’s trailer features an elderly Mohana recalling a vanished past:

“The water of Manchar Lake was once so pure we could drink it from lotus leaves,” he said. “Now even migratory birds refuse to drink from it and we must travel miles on land to fetch clean water.”

The old man’s words echo the grief at the heart of Moklani, a story that has moved artists and audiences beyond Pakistan.

Independent filmmaker Jamil Iqbal praised the film for its “emotional power and relevance.”

“It’s a beautiful film not just because of its visuals, but because of its heart-wrenching, thought-provoking story,” he said. “We need more storytellers like Jawad Sharif in Pakistan who take on serious subjects such as climate change and cultural loss.”

He added that films like Moklani serve as both awareness tools and historical archives, documenting the resistance of indigenous communities facing environmental collapse.

Syed Ahmed Khan, a business development director who attended the trailer launch, said the film resonates deeply with audiences.

“Everyone watching the trailer feels a connection with it because everyone has said farewell to something or someone in their lives,” he said. “The pain of disconnection is profoundly visible in the film, and the subtle way Sharif addresses climate change, without rhetoric, makes the message powerful and clear about how man-made disasters are destroying our own future.”

Indeed, Sharif feels storytelling can be a catalyst for change.

“A story can always initiate a change,” he said. “When we talk about Mohanas, or climate change, or environmental loss, we are essentially talking about our own future. The hope is that these conversations turn into action.”

For him, the award signifies more than global recognition.

“The happiest thing for me is that this film started a conversation,” Sharif said. “Because of the award, there was a lot of awareness created locally. People began talking about this story, about this culture, about climate change and man-made disasters. That dialogue, that awareness, is what I value most.”