The Gymnasts of Fisherman Colony: A Hopeful Trajectory for Determined Pakistani Girls

By Kim Hughes

Rating: B-

Though unimpeachable in its good intent, the largely Canadian-funded new documentary The Gymnasts of Fisherman Colony doesn’t quite match on the screen the dazzle its press materials promise on the page.

Helmed by three-time Emmy Award–winning Pakistani Canadian director Habiba Nosheen and executive produced by, among others, Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai and Canadian journalist Anna Maria Tremonti, the film follows a clutch of tween and teen girls from Karachi’s Machar Colony (a.k.a. Fisherman Colony) who take up gymnastics.

In many parts of world, that wouldn’t be a big deal. But for impoverished Muslim girls in Pakistan like 17-year-old Anwara, her 14-year-old sister Sonia, and their friend Kiran, 17, access to sports is a very big deal. So too is getting an education, achieving basic citizenship rights despite having undocumented parents, and dodging marriage long enough to live as the kids they are.

“Girls study until grade five,” Kiran offers at one point. “Then you can learn the Quran. After that you just stay home.” Indeed, Anwara and Sonia’s mother Kohinoor was married off at age 13; she supports the family on just $90 a month cleaning the homes of rich people six days a week. Theirs is not an easy life.

But gymnastics ignite the girls’ spirits, despite the uncomfortable reality of needing to practice free of burqas with a male coach, which some girls perceive as being “sinful” despite the chaste nature of the relationship. (Male gymnastics is encouraged in Pakistan; as such, almost all the coaches are men).

Two scenes in the film — both featuring human rights lawyer and child welfare advocate Tahera Hasan, who plays an outsize role in the girls’ development at school and on the balance beam — are heartbreaking in their innocence.

One finds the girls picnicking over takeout biryani and discussing the shame they fear will tarnish their families because they are playing sports. Another, focused on a rare, just-for-fun daytrip to the beach, sees the girls letting loose and surrendering their worries to the wind. But we know the whimsy cannot last.

When Pakistan announces it will hold a National Women’s Gymnastics Championship, the girls begin preparing for what could be a life-altering competition, though marriages will get in the way for some. Others will falter — and succeed — in different ways.

The Gymnasts of Fisherman Colony strives to convey many things: the institutionally sexist nature of the society the girls live in and the subsequent stranglehold of their inevitable marriages, their poverty and lack of agency. But these factors are treated almost as accepted backdrops to the tryouts rather than menacing factors stalking reality.

A wedding scene featuring a beautifully adorned but dead-eyed teenage bride (and thus, also a gymnastics team dropout) finds the otherwise progressive Hasan simply chalking it up to tradition. “In our culture and especially, in the culture they are growing up in, marriage is an important component of your life. She,” — the unsmiling bride — “is excited and she gets along with her finance. I feel good about that... At the end of the day, they will have their homes and their families, and they might be able to go on and give their girls the life that they did not have.”

Smart money wouldn’t bet on that.

Moreover, though sweet, none of the girls are especially riveting subjects; arguably the most riveting of the lot suddenly elopes and is subsequently forced by her newlywed husband to drop out of both sports and the documentary.

Interviews with Hasan provide the most context, but I found myself longing for additional detail and background missing from the film’s interviews with the girls, their mostly reticent parents, and, notably, others in their expansive community as well as the competition judges whose perspective on the girls’ gymnastic exploits go unexplored. Also, the film’s 92-minute running time feels prolonged.

And yet. Ninety-two minutes spent with these determined young gymnasts challenging towering, prejudicial odds is something of its own reward and is buoyed by a very happy ending for one young subject who leaps and tumbles forward — and upward — with commendable grace.

The Gymnasts of Fisherman Colony. Directed by Habiba Nosheen. Premiering on CBC Gem November 4 and screening November 15 at TIFF Lightbox 2 as part of the Reel Asian International Film Festival.