Drawing on Sofian and Annie’s extensive personal archive of videos, photos and audio, Karachi Sky unfolds across 15 years and two continents, telling an intimate story of love, creativity and loss and featuring a score by Grammy award-winning artist Arooj Aftab. 

We follow Annie’s rise to stardom in Pakistan as a model and actress and her eventual turn to journalism. Sofian, an aspiring filmmaker, meets her on the set of a music video and they fall in love, move to New York and build a life together.

After years on the road following their creative pursuits starts to take its toll, Annie and Sofian separate, but continue to lean on each other creatively. Annie’s journalism eventually takes her back to her country, where she begins work on her book Sita Under the Crescent Moon, immersing herself in its many shrines dedicated to Sufism, Islam’s ecstatic spiritual tradition. Here, Annie forges deep connections with the women who she’s writing about, many of whom have found refuge in the shrines after escaping difficult and even dangerous circumstances. As Annie delves deeper into the struggles and traumas of the shrine women, she drifts out of touch with friends and family. Days after submitting the first draft of her book, she takes her own life, shocking her loved ones and Pakistan. 

In the final act of the film, Sofian retraces Annie’s footsteps across Pakistan in an effort to find connection and closure. Karachi Sky is an ode to her remarkable life, to the love that binds souls across space and time, and the power of art to express and process grief. 

Karachi Sky has received support from: 

• Creative Capital
• Disney+Sundance
• CAAM Building Bridges 
• Firelight Media Spark Fund
• Catapult Film Fund 
• Goldhouse+Sundance 
• Islamic Scholarship Fund

For seven years, I was married to a truly inspiring human being – the Pakistani journalist Annie Ali Khan. She is the reason I make documentaries. When she passed away suddenly in 2018, like many people processing loss, I found myself trying to come to terms with a world without her, which is how Karachi Sky began. As makers of media, both Annie and I had an impulse to document our lives. And we did that a lot (maybe too much, if you ask my editor). After she was gone, I collected a mountain of photos, videos and words into one place. As I sorted through a decade-long personal archive of digital and physical correspondence, a film started to emerge. This is the film we are now working to complete, weaving together fragmentary moments, images and words into a kind of visual Sufi poem.