Saim Sadiq’s ‘Joyland’ makes a statement about inclusivity, diversity and Indo-Pak camaraderie

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The crowd-pleaser ensemble film is a cis-trans romance in a conservative family drama. It’s about desires and their undoing. A patriarch’s (Rana Amanullah) desire for a male grandchild. A woman’s desire to not have a child, while another’s to keep trying till she bears a boy. An elderly widow’s desire for companionship. A trans dancer’s desire for fame in an only-women space. A desire for intimacy. All tied by patriarchy. Joyland is an amusement park, literally (there’s one in Lahore), where you are allowed to be freer — it is a place of possibility, it is a place of release, like the theatres — where the women can have moments of childlike glee, let out screams of joy or angst. The film has enough compassion for the space as much as for the people. The story is about three people, with a transwoman as one of the leads, but the film is not about her transness. And the ancillary characters, like the caring neighbour Fayyaz aunty (Sania Saeed) — a natural who delivers a delicate, compelling act — are fleshed out, given individual importance. When all the stars align, there will be a spectacle.

Saim Sadiq at JW Marriott Cannes. (Credit: Stephanie Cornfield)

A not-so-masculine man Haider (Ali Junejo) — nanny to his nieces, helper to his bhabhi Nucchi (Sarwat Gilani; best known for Churails web-series), a feminist husband to Mumtaz (Rasti Farooq) who works at a salon — falls in love with a trans dancer Biba, but remains a confused cookie. “I wasn’t tracing Haider from a place of sexuality, but of masculinity. I was interested in the protagonist not having a label, not identifying, not knowing, in this very liberal world where he has access to those things, where he is sort of falling in love with the trans girl who’s very aware of identity politics. How the pressure of knowing what you are comes as much from the conservative side as the liberal; even liberals are very confused if you don’t say I am this, this is the colour of the flag, I identify with this particular colour. And I’m kind of in between all the colours, the fact that for a guy like that there’s really no space in either of the worlds. We don’t like confusion; we don’t have empathy for confused people. And that, for me, was the right protagonist,” says Sadiq, 31. “A character like this (a meek guy who has no lines, he barely speaks, only responds to others) in the hands of a lesser actor would just not fly. Ali makes it work in the most special way. He really did have, perhaps, the toughest part in the film,” he adds.

Joyland is an extension of the arc Sadiq sketched in his short film Darling (2019), which also featured Alina Khan and Punjabi mujra and won the Orizzonti Award for Best Short Film at the 2019 Venice Film Festival. “It’s a chicken-and-egg thing, but Darling’s making did inform Joyland greatly. I wanted Darling to be an exploration of the world of the theatre, because I didn’t know much about it. I wanted it to be the start of a relationship of trust, a creative collaboration with Alina. I knew the family side of the story (of Joyland) in my head, but I didn’t know how I wanted to use the theatre and bring it into the house. I got to know the missing pieces after the making of Darling.” It’s a kind of wish fulfillment of Alina’s character who wanted just a chance to show her dance in Darling to getting the spotlight in Joyland.

Biba dance still from the film

In the feature film, two worlds collide, the Other — the transwoman and the tabooed mujra, or theatrical semi-erotic dance — enters the house, where “a right-wing family, unapologetically conservative, with no intentions of changing, still feels things. It’s their own morals they are in clash with. Nothing is stopping Haider from doing whatever he wants to do, his father won’t shoot him because he’s a good person, but there’s a power play which is emotional in nature,” says the Lahore-based director, who, growing up, had to reconcile and balance the two aspects of his parents being good, understanding people and his household upper-middle-class conservative.

“For me, in a film that was about gender and sexuality, it was imperative…and the germ of the idea was that the man’s going to fall in love with the trans girl, and that would shake up the family in a certain way. Transpersons are very prominent in Pakistan and anybody is allowed to identify their own gender in Pakistan. They are in our neighbourhoods, on the streets, in the shopping malls, everywhere. So, for me, it’s as normal to put them in a film as to put a male or a female character, and right next to them, not more important, but not less either,” he adds, “Usually, in films, there is always a man impersonating, wearing a woman’s clothes, and for comedic purposes. It’s hard to even watch that as a representation of a trans character because it’s not just inappropriately cast but also not a character, it’s a trope.”

Joyland  producer Apoorva Guru Charan

As for mujra, he may have walked in on uncles watching it on TV and have a good laugh — though it wouldn’t enter respectable homes, but a cable TV channel, besides CDs/VHS cassettes, would show repeat runs of these dances — but Sadiq watched his first real-life mujra while researching for Darling. Exclusive to Pakistan, the hyper-sexualised dance is an ironic fruit of the General Zia-ul-Haq regime’s ban culture. It became entertainment for working-class men, because all other avenues had been closed, and the society had become very sexually repressed. “When you suppress something, it comes out in some weird way. He clamped down on all theatres. Pakistan had a great theatre industry, great writers and actors. What emerged in the vacant theatres was this sort of a B-grade industry, it co-opted theatre and became about suggestive one-liners, bawdy jokes, and these dances,” he says.

Bollywood was a childhood companion. At age three, he would watch the Sridevi-starrer Laadla (1994) “so many times” at his aunt’s place, who had VHS cassettes of about three or so films. Readily available, it became “my go-to”, he’d watch Laadla over any other pastime or even play. “Anybody my age would remember watching Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995), Andaz Apna Apna (1994). Piracy was still fresh, and we were benefitting fully from it because there was no other way for us to watch Bollywood,” he says. And then his animated look turns pallid as he adds, “Bollywood doesn’t make that kind of movie anymore,” counting Baahubali (2015) and RRR (2022) as his recent favourites. “If you’re going to be a big mainstream Bollywood film, be this or don’t be, this is really a film that doesn’t care about logic, it’s an experience.” In the ’90s, when Sadiq’s Army-officer father would be posted in “high-tension border areas, and the tensions would flare up, people would observe a fast from Bollywood films for a couple of weeks and return to them once the tension subsided. It was pretty normal to watch Bollywood films, but we wouldn’t watch the jingoistic ones,” he says.

Haider and Biba in a film still

With 20-30 films a year, Pakistan’s film industry — which recently got the status of an industry, tax incentives, etc. announced — is “probably even smaller than any regional industry in India.” While the commercial-versus-arthouse-film divide is “smaller and less pronounced, a fraction of filmmakers hops between arthouse and mainstream. It’s very loosey-goosey right now. But arthouse cinema does get theatrical exhibitions in Pakistan (Sarmad Khoosat’s Manto, 2015, etc.). There are that many theatres and not that many films coming out of the country, so whenever any Pakistani film comes, it’s likely to get a screen.” Watching Pakistani cinema in the theatres usually left Sadiq in a bad mood, barring films like Shoaib Mansoor’s tent-pole Khuda Kay Liye (2007) and Bol (2011), both being political and the biggest hits of their time. Sadiq made Stepmotherland (2014), a docu short on the blasphemy law, while studying Anthropology at LUMS, Lahore, before he assisted director Sarmad Khoosat and went to Columbia University. He edited Khoosat’s recently-released Kamli, and Khoosat co-produced Joyland (came on board in early 2021). Among the things Sadiq has learnt from Khoosat (organisation, punctuality, caring for the crew) is close-up shots and how he frames a face.

“There was a lot of in-kind resource and physical production support from Khoosat Films; in terms of equity, it was all American (the first Pakistani film to get US funding, be an exclusive US co-production),” says Los Angeles-based Apoorva Guru Charan, the film’s Indian origin producer and Sadiq’s bench-partner from Columbia. She was born in Hyderabad, India. Her family moved to the US in 1998.

“It felt like the most natural film to come out of South Asia. The conflicts are universal, but context is specific: living in a joint family, having to deal with your bhabhi at home, grandfather, etc.,” says Charan, 30. She notes Sadiq’s two key decisions to steer clear of the Western gaze — in consciously choosing a Lebanese DOP Joe Saade (Costa Brava, Lebanon, 2021), “who’s brilliant and has a very specific way of bringing texture to the world that’s in front of him”, and, in the editorial stage, rejecting Western filmmaking trope, which is often single-protagonist driven, having a coming of age, a hero’s moment, all of that. Saim was clear this is an ensemble film, about South Asian families and communities, where one person’s decision has a ripple effect on the family,” she says.

A still from ‘Joyland’

Pakistani artistes can’t work in India, Indian artistes are warned against online collaborations with Pakistan, and “Go to Pakistan” rhetoric gets thrown around unsparingly. “Pakistan can be just a bipolar country, I was in the US, when Kapoor & Sons (2016) released, and I was worried what would happen to Fawad Khan (whose Indian fans are just glad to see him back on screen in Ms Marvel, the first Muslim superhero series) when he returns home, it was a big risk. But nothing happened. He was celebrated, which is a nice thing, but how do you calibrate that versus a film which has nothing controversial about it suddenly becoming very controversial? (The reference is, perhaps, to Khoosat’s Zindagi Tamasha/Circle of Life, which won the Kim Ji-Seok Award at 2019 Busan film festival but was dropped out of the Oscar race.) It had nothing to do with the blasphemy law, there was nothing there, it was passed by the censor boards, there was a misconception, but suddenly it became big because people needed a topic at the time to divert your attention. So, it’s hard to give a comment when you live in such times where you don’t know what the rule is.”

Charan travelled to Pakistan for the film’s making. “Joyland (which took Sadiq seven years to make) is a Saim-Apoorva collaboration more than anything. I had a very good experience in Pakistan,” she says, “The team was relentless in going through security clearances so that I didn’t have to produce it remotely.” Sadiq adds, “Poorvi and I work together well. She happens to be an Indian, I happen to be a Pakistani, and I don’t care about that. I don’t understand what this artistes’ ban means. I didn’t go to India. We tried our best, we got her here. It worked out really well.” The film will be released in France, and the makers, who are working on the key market of North America right now, hope to release it in India and Pakistan “within the next 18 months”.