I grew up listening to my grandfather's stories of our musical past. He would often talk about the orchestras that played at concerts and the musicians who played on Sunday evenings on street corners. By the time I grew up in the '80s, all of this was a thing of the past. I lived vicariously through his stories and often wondered what it would have felt like to have been part of his generation.

An Academy Award nomination is stuff dreams are made of.

I feel that for the first time in a long time, educated Pakistanis are returning to their country to start up educational projects, to start up businesses, so instead of the brain-drain that happened in the 1950s and 1960s, the country is growing and improving economically.

Working in any country where you want to talk about the kind of issues that other people don't want to talk about is difficult.

By bringing the voices of the ordinary people faced with extraordinary challenges to television screens around the world, I hope to affect change in one community at a time.

I became a documentary filmmaker because I wanted to make socially conscious films. I never studied filmmaking - everything I have learned has been on the field.

I hope I can make Pakistan proud by bringing home an Oscar.