Each winter, as the air turns colder and the skies begin to fade, a familiar unease sets in. The city slows under a dull, heavy haze. Breathing becomes conscious, sometimes painful, and the simple act of inhaling is no longer effortless.
For most people, smog is an inconvenience that clouds the morning commute or dims the skyline. But for someone like me who lives with asthma, it is a more intimate kind of suffering, a health risk that defines the rhythm of life.
Over the years, I’ve come to see smog as more than an environmental issue. While it corrodes our lungs, it also changes how we see, feel, and live. As a filmmaker, I began to wonder if I experienced smog this way, how might others, especially artists, perceive it?
That question became the seed for my documentary The Color of Smog.
The film grew out of both personal experience and curiosity. I wanted to understand how artists interpret this shared crisis. Pollution is often discussed in numbers: air quality indexes, and micrograms per cubic meter. But what about its emotional weight? How does it shape our imagination, our sense of beauty, our hope, and despair?
In the hope of finding answers to these questions, I brought together sixteen artists and asked them to respond to smog in their own way as witnesses and creators. Each transformed this suffocating experience into something tangible. Their work became a reflection of grief, anger, resilience, and quiet hope.
Filming them create their smog inspired art pieces, I realized that pollution doesn’t just destroy; it reveals. It reveals our fragility, our distance from nature, and yet our ability to find meaning in despair.
As a filmmaker, I’ve always believed that stories rooted in personal truth can reach deeper than data or reports ever could. The Color of Smog became my own act of catharsis, a way to confront the invisible enemy that tightens my lungs and to stand in solidarity with those who face the same silent struggle.
While filming, I wanted not only to document the crisis but also to change how people looked at it. In those early days of Lahore’s worsening smog, I hoped to raise awareness and to make people feel the problem, not just understand it.
Each artist’s process became a small act of defiance: every brushstroke, every verse, every sculpture reclaiming the right to breathe. Smog is democratic in its cruelty. It spares no one, not the rich behind walled houses, nor the poor on the streets. Yet, it affects everyone differently.
In the end, what I hope the film conveys is not despair, but possibility. If art can give form to something as invisible as air, maybe awareness can lead to action.
Although smog is there all through the year, it only becomes visible in winter. So, across Pakistan, the arrival of winter now means the return of smog. It shuts down schools, delays flights, and cloaks cities in toxic fog. But the greater danger is how easily we are learning to live with it and have accepted pollution as normal.
The Color of Smog is a refusal of that acceptance. It is both personal and collective: an artist’s cry for cleaner air, a citizen’s plea for responsibility, and a filmmaker’s belief that beauty can still rise from the grey.
Through my films, I’ve learned to turn my struggle into something visible, something shared. Because before we can clean the air around us, we must first clear the haze within, the one that convinces us that living like this is enough.
The content is written by Jawad Sharif. The author is filmmaker and owns Jawad Sharif Films.
What does that even mean ? How is smog related to artists ?
It’s an act of nature due to human behavior
Artist or not doesn’t matter