Pakistani

Ghost School: The Award-Winning Pakistani Film That Sindh's Censors Tried to Stop

IR

By Inaya Rizvi, Drama & Film Critic·October 27, 2026·7 min read

Ghost School is the first feature from British-Pakistani filmmaker Seemab Gul, and it has had a strange journey home. It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, toured more than a dozen festivals, won a best director award in London and played in German cinemas. Then, in August, the censor board in Sindh, the province where it was shot and where its story is set, declared it "not suitable for public exhibition" without saying why.

After two rounds in the Sindh High Court, the film now opens in Pakistan on Friday. Below: when and where you can see it, what it's about, what a "ghost school" actually is, the full story of the censorship fight, and what the critics have said.

Ghost School | Official Trailer

Ghost School release date and where to watch

Ghost School opens in Pakistani cinemas on Friday, 30 October 2026. Seemab Gul, who financed the film herself and is paying for its distribution, has said it will open in Punjab and Sindh. Screenings in Sindh depend on the provincial censor board, which was ordered by the High Court on 19 October to take a fresh decision within 10 days; at the time of writing, no new Sindh certificate had been reported. The federal censor board and Punjab's board both cleared the film without cuts.

It isn't on Netflix or any other streaming service, and no streaming deal has been announced. Outside Pakistan, it has been showing in German cinemas since September and continues to play at festivals. It's a film, not a drama serial, despite what some searches suggest.

What is Ghost School about?

Rabia (Nazualiya Arsalan) is ten, lives in a poor fishing village on the edge of Karachi, and loves school more than anything. One morning she arrives to find the gate chained shut. The village's explanation is that the school is under a spell: her teacher has fallen ill, and people whisper that a jinn has taken hold of the building. Most of the children are happy with an unexpected holiday. Rabia isn't.

Her mother (Samina Seher) tells her to stay away, and the village's elders brush her off, but Rabia keeps asking questions, going from door to door and office to office. What she finds has less to do with ghosts than with the men who run the village, some of whom have their own reasons for keeping the school shut. Festival programmes call it a fable, and the supernatural is never quite ruled out, but the real target is a system that lets children's education quietly disappear.

What is a ghost school?

In Pakistan, a "ghost school" is a government school that exists on paper but not in practice. The building, budget and staff are on the books, and teachers may still be drawing salaries, but the doors are locked and no children are being taught. Many simply stopped functioning years ago. It's the reason the title is a double meaning: Rabia's school is "haunted", but it is also a ghost school in the bureaucratic sense.

Gul has said she was inspired by a trip to Pakistan in 2022, when she saw abandoned school buildings in Sindh and Balochistan, and that she wanted to make a film about girls' education. Appealing to the censors in August, she put the number of ghost schools in Sindh at around 15,000. Official counts are lower and vary widely from survey to survey, but the problem is long-standing and well documented.

Why was Ghost School banned in Sindh?

In early August 2026, the Sindh Board of Film Censors refused to give Ghost School a certificate, writing only that it was "not suitable for public exhibition". It gave no reason. Gul said she was shocked, that the film deals only with education, and that she had written to the board without reply. Sindh's culture minister said the board was autonomous and would have had valid reasons.

Gul took the case to the Sindh High Court, which in August told the board to hear the filmmakers and decide again. The board's second decision, sent on 11 September, offered a Universal (U) certificate only if eight things were removed: several words, including "wadera" (a term for a feudal landlord), "haram khor" and "manhoos siyasatdan" ("jinxed politician"), a child's abusive remark in a classroom scene, and two scenes in the film's final sequence.

On 19 October the High Court set almost all of those cuts aside. The judges said the board had treated very different objections as one and given no reasons for most of them, and noted that the federal and Punjab boards had passed the same version uncut. Only the child's remark, which the filmmakers had agreed to remove, survived. The board now has to either certify the film for all audiences with no further cuts or give the filmmakers a hearing and a reasoned decision on each objection.

Seemab Gul and the cast

Seemab Gul is a British-Pakistani writer-director who trained at the London Film School. Her short film Sandstorm, about a Karachi schoolgirl blackmailed over a private video, premiered at the Venice Film Festival in 2021 and went on to Sundance. Ghost School is her first feature, and she wrote, directed and produced it. She is already developing her next film, Haven of Hope.

Nazualiya Arsalan plays Rabia, and nearly every review singles her out. Samina Seher plays her mother, and the cast also includes Adnan Shah Tipu. The cinematographer is the Afghan-born German filmmaker Zamarin Wahdat, whose images of the village are among the things critics praise most.

Festivals and awards

Ghost School review: what critics say

International reviews have been mostly warm. Critics consistently praise two things: Nazualiya Arsalan's performance, described as natural and well beyond her years, and Zamarin Wahdat's photography of the village. One German critic compared it to Abbas Kiarostami's Where Is the Friend's House?, and the jury in Los Angeles cited its "exceptional social realism and restrained storytelling".

The doubts are about the fable. Some reviewers felt the jinn metaphor is mentioned constantly but never fully committed to, and that the film works best when it is simply realistic; others found the middle repetitive, as Rabia moves from one conversation to the next, or the ending a little too neat. Scores have ranged from middling to four stars out of five, with German critics among the most enthusiastic.

For another Pakistani film that made its name abroad first, see our guide to Hanging by a Wire, Pakistan's Oscar entry, or browse all our Pakistani movie coverage.

Quick answers

Spotted something out of date? Send a correction.