By Carlos Aguilar

LOS ANGELES — Over the past year, writer-director Saim Sadiq has garnered a series of unprecedented accolades for Pakistani cinema.

Last May, his debut film, ‘Joyland’, released Friday (7), became the first production from Pakistan to compete in the official selection at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the jury prize in the Un Certain Regard sidebar. It was also the first entry from the country to be shortlisted for the best international feature film Oscar. And just last month, it emerged as the first Pakistani title to win at the Film Independent Spirit Awards in the same category.

The project also counts among its executive producers Nobel Peace Prize recipient Malala Yousafzai, Oscar-winning British Pakistani actor Riz Ahmed and Iranian American director Ramin Bahrani.

But despite this international recognition and notable support, ‘Joyland’, which features characters defying traditional binary gender norms, remains banned in Sadiq’s hometown of Lahore, and in the entire Punjab province, which houses the majority of Pakistan’s cinemas and about half of the Islamic nation’s entire population.

“I wanted the film to play in Pakistani theatres more than anything else,” an impassioned Sadiq, 32, said during a recent interview at the Los Angeles home of the movie’s Indian-born producer, Apoorva Charan.

Sadiq and Charan met while both were studying at Columbia University. It was during their time there that Sadiq began writing ‘Joyland’, a coming-of-age story told as an intricate ensemble piece, as a screenwriting class assignment.

When Haider (Ali Junejo), a mild-mannered young man in an arranged marriage, lands a job as a backup dancer for Biba (Alina Khan), a strong-willed transgender performer, his wife, Mumtaz (Rasti Farooq), quits her job against her will to help out with the domestic tasks Haider was doing before, including caring for his brother’s children.

But Haider must keep his new source of income, and outlet for self-expression, a secret, as the couple live in an extended family household under the rule of Haider’s traditional elderly father. That Haider explores his sexuality with Biba further complicates his situation.

To challenge the Hollywood notion of the sole protagonist, Sadiq said he wanted to understand “the collective human experience. It was very important to make this a very collectivist film, a film which was truly an ensemble film where the effect of one person’s actions on other people were also taken into account from their perspective.”

That ‘Joyland’, among its many themes, includes a burgeoning romance between a trans woman and a straight-identifying man caused public outcry from Pakistan’s conservative factions on social media just a few days before the film’s scheduled November local release date.

The seismic controversy led to the film’s ban, even after Sadiq had diligently obtained the required permits from each of the three separate censor boards in the country: those pertinent to the provinces of Punjab and Sindh, plus the federal board that covers the rest of the territory.

In order to appease them, Sadiq had already compromised the artistic integrity of his work.

First, the director was asked to remove two intimate scenes that the censors unsurprisingly deemed too risqué. Sadiq had anticipated these moments would not meet their parameters, so he had shot alternate versions so that the narrative could still run coherently in the eventual Pakistani version. However, more changes were demanded.

“What I wasn’t prepared for was a bunch of laughably random cuts and dialogue omissions that were asked for by the federal and Punjab censor boards, which included blurring the shot of a platonic hug between a husband and wife on a rooftop,” Sadiq said.

Censorship is unfortunately a cornerstone of Pakistan’s relationship with cinema, Ali Khan, co-author of the book ‘Cinema and Society: Film and Social Change in Pakistan’, said in a recent video interview.

In 1954, ‘Roohi’, directed by W.Z. Ahmed, became the first film banned in an independent Pakistan for its perceived socialist agenda. Since then, and across the multiple political transitions the nation has undergone, creative freedom has often been hindered. Only about a dozen feature films, mostly commercial fare, are produced in Pakistan each year.

“There are so many stories to tell from Pakistan, but how do you do that if everything is controversial?” Ali Kahn said. “It’s really unfortunate that we are not able to support our own films because of this paranoia over how the country is being depicted.”

While some Pakistani productions may have had instances of subtle, implied queerness in the past, Sadiq believes there hadn’t been a film that overtly engaged with gender and sexual diversity in Pakistan before ‘Joyland’.

Fortunately, the international attention ‘Joyland’ had already received abroad, as well as a flood of vocal tweets from the filmmaker and his allies denouncing the decision, exerted enough pressure that the edited iteration was allowed to be screened in the Sindh province and the territory under the federal censor board (which includes the capital city of Islamabad).

But the authorities in Punjab opted to uphold the ban.

For Alina Khan, a dancer turned actress who first collaborated with Sadiq on the short film ‘Darling’, the news that her work wouldn’t be seen in Lahore was devastating.

“I needed the film to play in my city so that the people who have wronged me there for being trans could see me in a more human light,” she said, speaking in Urdu with Sadiq acting as her interpreter. “And I wanted to show my community that it is possible for a trans person to make something out of their life.”

Although Pakistan passed a bill protecting the rights of transgender citizens in 2018, violence, including murder, against trans people in the country remains an alarming issue. Since the law came into existence, homicides of transgender people have increased, with 14 people killed last year, according to the Trans Murder Monitoring project.

The rest of Sadiq’s cast were also aware of the significance of the story they were sharing. Junejo, for example, came on board after other actors rejected the part because of its subject matter. Even the sensitive way Haider uses his body when dancing is cause for concern in an environment where masculinity is harshly policed.

“It was important that we were making it in Pakistan because its patriarchal society demands certain roles from every one of its members, men included,” Junejo said.

In turn, Farooq believes that one of the most remarkable outcomes of the film’s toilsome journey in Pakistan are the conversations that both detractors as well as defenders are having about the purpose of art in general and of filmmaking in particular.

“Pakistani viewers who had for long been turned into passive consumers of TV or film were all of a sudden actively talking about the role of art in their lives,” Farooq said. “It’s not the job of films to placate you. Films can talk about things that are uncomfortable.”

Months after the film’s partial theatrical release, heated online discussions over ‘Joyland’ continue, especially when anyone of note in Pakistan publicly comments on it.

For his part, Sadiq holds on to the film’s hard-fought victories in the face of the restrictions.

Embattled as his work might be in the place of his birth, the director finds invigorating encouragement in learning that other people, in Pakistan and elsewhere, have embraced it.

“Once the film was finished, I understood I had initially done it out of selfish reasons,” he said. “But now it means something to others, and it means something to the world even if in a small way, so I need to do right by it and push for it to be seen.”

-New York Times