Music is a universal language.

Pakistan destroyed its own reputation. If anything, I have improved Pakistan's image.

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.

But the biggest challenge overall was narrowing down the complex narrative elements into a clean and straightforward story while maintaining a sense of the cultural context that makes the film special.

My advice to other female directors would be to pay no heed to naysayers. Women can be united in the fact that there has always been someone in our lives who has told us "it can't be done" or "there is only so much you can do." We are constantly encouraged to think that being born a woman means we were born with limited choices and compromised dreams.

I have very strong Canadian connections. My daughter was born there a year and half ago. But because of the nature of my job, I need to be in countries where I can get the stories that I am looking at.

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.