On the 10th and 11th of January 2026, the 4th edition of the Chalta Phirta Doc Film Festival (CPDF) arrived in Karachi, transforming Nani Ghar (CFAW) into a space for documentary cinema, conversation and collective witnessing. Open to the public with subsidised entry tickets and walk-ins welcome, the festival continues its mission to bring non-fiction storytelling into accessible, communal spaces.
Organised by the Documentary Association of Pakistan (DAP), CPDF forms part of a sustained effort to cultivate a documentary culture in a country where non-fiction cinema often struggles for both funding and visibility. Founded to provide mentorship, community, and a platform for under-represented Pakistani stories, DAP positions documentary filmmaking as both artistic practice and community engagement.
Since its first edition in 2019, CPDF has centered films that confront themes often sidelined in mainstream discourse, migration, conflict, displacement, faith, resistance. Its inaugural showcase brought internationally acclaimed Pakistani documentaries to home audiences, including the Emmy-winning Armed with Faith, alongside A Walnut Tree and Sindhustan. In doing so, CPDF collapsed the distance between global recognition and local accessibility, reminding audiences that Pakistani stories resonate far beyond national borders.
In Pakistan, documentaries have often occupied a precarious position, respected internationally yet marginal at home. CPDF challenges this paradox. By subsidising entry and encouraging walk-ins, the festival lowers barriers to participation, framing documentary viewing not as an elite art practice but as a public act. Documentary cinema operates at the intersection of art and evidence; it archives lived realities while shaping collective memory. In a moment when narratives are contested and histories rewritten, the documentary becomes both witness and archive.
As CPDF returns to Karachi, it carries forward a quiet but persistent proposition: that the stories shaping Pakistan’s present deserve to be seen in their complexity, unfiltered, locally grounded, and collectively experienced. On January 10th and 11th, Nani Ghar became a site of encounter, between filmmaker and audience, between memory and present, between what is recorded and what is felt. In a landscape saturated with spectacle, Chalta Phirta Doc Film Festival offers something steadier: the courage to look directly at the real.