It doesn’t have songs, is in Punjabi, is made by a Pakistani and is considered a mainstream film — documentary filmmaker Sabiha Sumar’s first film “Khamosh Pani” is finally set to be released in theatres across the country.

But will there be an audience for a film about a victim of the partition of India into two countries whose past catches up with her in unexpected and tragic ways?

The question needs to be asked even though the sweet tender film has floored everyone who has seen it so far.

Dir: Sabiha Sumar
Cast: Kirron Kher, Aamir Malik, Shilpa Shukla

In conversation with a friend, a visibly disappointed Ayesha (Kher) casually mentions, “If your son cannot be yours; who can be?”

She obviously refers to her once innocent and sweet boy Salim (Malik), who’s turned a religious fanatic. Also, her supposedly protective Sikh family in pre-partition India, who had preferred to abandon her, force her to commit suicide, lest she face the horrors of being a non-Muslim girl left behind in Islamic Pakistan.

Pakistan’s Sabiha Sumar won the top prize at Switzerland’s principal film festival(6-16 August) with her story of a woman whose son becomes an extremist.

The jury awarded the Golden Leopard to “Khamosh Pani” (”Silent Waters”), about the relationship between a widow and her son as the young man veers into religious extremism after in 1979. The film also won the festival’s Ecumenical Prize.

The open spaces in the Pakistani villages were packed. People were sitting in trees and on rooftops. In a nation that barely has a film industry, director Sabiha Sumar’s travelling cinema was both a novelty and a flashpoint.

What Sumar showed in 41 villages throughout Pakistan earlier this year was her new feature film Khamosh Pani (Silent Waters), which depicts how religious fundamentalism — in this case, both Muslim and Sikh — can destroy families.