A widowed schoolteacher in Lahore becomes a viral sensation overnight when she accidentally unleashes her
unabashed opinions on social media. This newfound fame as an unlikely influencer comes with its own
challenges as she has to navigate archaic mindsets and secret identities while raising her ten-year-old son in a
world where women’s right to having a voice and owning space, physical or online, is a constant challenge.
Qandeel Baloch was a raunchy social media star from the poorer masses of Pakistan. Unleashing the brave
and provocative; wildly popular and wildly hated. We learned of her exactly a week before she was brutally
murdered….by her brother. It was an atypical honor killing because the family was well aware of her “ways”
and were also financially gaining from it. It was a new way of experiencing “shame”; it was a new kind of
“lynching”. It was an incredibly horrific perfect storm brewing; in huge part, by immense social media trolling
and in part by the indefatigable patriarchal society, we live in.
What triggered the writing of this story was her resilient and irreverent spirit. We strangely couldn’t stop
thinking about her. It was severely personal – this feeling of defeat and the brewing anger that was
simmering in our hearts. Any woman who owned her story and dared to occupy a public figure avatar in
Pakistan, even if online, was hated and silenced. All that she would be defined as wasin corelation to her
father, brother or husband. She did not dare speak up or be defined as her own person. Further, we observed
that while acknowledging Qandeel’s death, some self-identifying feminists shockingly lacked empathy
towards her. It made us realize that the flawed understanding of “honor” ran far deeper in our culture than
we cared to admit. We’d already lost friends to this narrative.
However, the militant optimist zeitgeist in us did not want to write a story without hope. We don’t want to
glorify an honor killing. We want to make a film where we gave the Pakistani audience, the world’s audience, a
second chance to possibly save her. This is the genesis of ONE OF A KIND, a fictional story inspired by
Qandeel’s story but also not limited to her fight, a study to track the correlation between hate crimes and
social media wildfires. This film is an ode to all those women in the shadows who were inspired by her bravery.
We wish to blow wind beneath the wings of all the women who want to be seen and heard.