My topics are timely. When an event is happening is when I want to be there... I think it is our duty to challenge the status quo.

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.

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.

There were a lot of unique challenges in producing the film, such as the logistical issues inherent in producing a long-term verite film in Pakistan, dealing with Urdu and Punjabi dialogue with an English-speaking editor and all the difficulties in recording, editing and clearing so many music tracks.

As filmmakers, you're not working on just one project, you're producing something, directing something, shooting something, and so it becomes hard to do it by yourself.

Fighting the Taliban and the various radical organizations on the front lines is like adding a Band-Aid to a cut, it may stop the bleeding but unless you clean it with antiseptic, the germs stay and multiply.

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.