On March 5 in my home city of Seattle, I had the pleasure of being part of the first North American audience to view the fine debut feature by a talented and enterprising Pakistani filmmaker, Iram Parveen Bilal. Josh (English title: Against the Grain) is the story of Fatima, an elegant and well-bred elite Karachiite who involves herself in village society and politics – thereby endangering herself and others – when she insists on finding out why her beloved maid has gone missing. It's a cross-cultural story but emphatically a domestic Pakistani one, with minimal reference to the world outside Pakistan. This is as it should be, though it renders Josh, like other serious Pakistani films, less accessible to Western viewers.

Americans are accustomed to seeing other countries, especially Pakistan, as refractions of our own national worries and self-regarding obsessions. That is our problem, not Pakistan's, and Josh serves us well by declining to pander or spoon-feed. It is a very good film, well conceived and executed on a small budget, and the question in my mind as I left the cinema was whether and how it might be possible to shoehorn such a serious piece of Pakistani storytelling into the awareness of some measurable fraction of the millions who know Pakistan only through TV news and Hollywood movies such as Zero Dark Thirty. I was very nearly the only gora at the Seattle screening.

Fatima is a tender-hearted and perhaps naïve member of Karachi's cosmopolitan elite. She wears sleeveless dresses; she socializes with fashionable young friends in trendy restaurants; her feckless artist boyfriend (not husband) wants to emigrate to America. She could have left well enough alone, but to do so would have been to abandon her servant to a cruel and undeserved fate. By going to the village and raising awkward questions, she not only leaves her own comfort zone but compels others to leave theirs as well. It's dangerous, even potentially explosive stuff, as all good art is. It holds a mirror up to a flawed society and asks its own characters, and by extension its viewers, to try to become better versions of themselves.