Kashmiri students Purta Jalal and her brother Zameen have made an award-winning documentary on the first Pashmina goat that was cloned.
When schools in Kashmir were shut down for a month due to protests in September this year, 13-year-old Purtas Jalal came up with a scheme to keep herself occupied — she decided to make a documentary film about Noorie, the world’s first Pashmina goat to be cloned. She roped in her 10-year-old brother Zameen to help her and the two of them have now won the top prize at India International Science Film Festival- 2016, organized by the Department of Science & Technology and Department of Earth Sciences, CSIR.
Purtas came across the story of Noorie when she was clearing old magazines and newspapers. She found out that the goat had been cloned by Dr Riaz Ahmad Shah and his team at Sher-e-Kashmir University of Agricultural Sciences and Technology. Due to a deep-seated passion for science, the siblings took the help of their father, a documentary filmmaker himself, to put together a script. But they hit a roadblock when they found that the university was also closed due to the protests and would not open for a while.
It was in October when they finally got permission from the university and Dr. Shah to commence filming.
Photo source: Facebook
“We put in all our efforts and thought from different perspectives how to make it better and give it a professional look. As we have grown seeing our father doing hard work on documentaries, we knew that it’s wasn’t an easy job for us and that too at this age,” Purtas told TwoCircles.net.
The children completed their film by September and entered the festival that was attended by over 3,000 delegates. The film won the first place in the category – films by students from colleges and universities of India. They also won a cash prize of Rs 1 lakh.
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