[A new movie from the director Saim Sadiq, "Joyland", Pakisitans
2023 Oscar entry, depicts queer love against the backdrop of a
Pakistani household and feels as familiar as our families are to us
here.The film follows a man who gets a job in a burlesque show and
falls in love with a trans woman. Banned in Pakistan, “Joyland”
earned accolades at the Cannes Film Festival. ]
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PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE FOLLY OF CENSORING “JOYLAND,” A SUBLIME FILM ABOUT FAMILY  
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Mohammed Hanif
April 12, 2023
The New Yorker
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_ A new movie from the director Saim Sadiq, "Joyland", Pakisitan's
2023 Oscar entry, depicts queer love against the backdrop of a
Pakistani household and feels as familiar as our families are to us
here.The film follows a man who gets a job in a burlesque show and
falls in love with a trans woman. Banned in Pakistan, “Joyland”
earned accolades at the Cannes Film Festival. _

"Joyland" (Ali Juenjo, Rasti Farooq) Movie Poster, Ebert

 

Last year, a film called “The Legend of Maula Jatt,” based on a
1979 cult classic, became the most successful Pakistani film in
history. The opening scene depicts the grisly murder of the Jatt
family; young Maula survives, and vows to exact revenge against the
perpetrators, namely Noori Natt. The two men spend the rest of the
movie hacking up each other’s associates. When the film first came
out in the U.K., some of the gore had to be edited out; the British
Board of Film Classification warned potential viewers of “frequent
scenes of strong bloody violence,” noting that, in one, “a woman
decapitates a man and holds up his bloody severed head. . . . In
another scene a man buries a baby alive.” Nonetheless, the uncut
film cleared censorship boards in Pakistan. It attracted hordes of
moviegoers, some of whom presumably couldn’t even understand the
Punjabi dialogue. Everyone who spoke to me about the film deemed it
too much fun to resist.

Also last year, an indie film about a middle-class Punjabi family sent
Pakistan into a moral panic. “Joyland
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a film directed by Saim Sadiq that won awards at Cannes and the Film
Independent Spirit Awards, and which Pakistan submitted to the 2023
Oscars, had to be cleared by the country’s three censor boards in
order to be screened in Pakistan. After a series of edits, the censor
boards certified the film. Then, just before its release, it was
banned. After lobbying by supporters of the film, Prime Minister
Muhammad Shehbaz Sharif assembled a review committee, which
recommended more changes. The carefully edited film was screened in
the province of Sindh, but remained banned in Punjab, Pakistan’s
most populated province and the film’s primary setting.

What was it about “Joyland” that made the arbiters of our social
order so fearful? In the film, Haider (Ali Junejo), a young man, lives
in his family home with his wife, Mumtaz (Rasti Farooq), who works in
a beauty parlor. Like millions of Pakistanis, surely, Haider is
confused about his sexuality. Also like millions of Pakistanis, he is
unemployed. His father (Salmaan Peerzada) is a garden-variety
patriarch who wants his son to get a job and give him a grandson. When
Haider finally finds a job at an erotic-dance theatre, he tells his
family that he is the theatre manager; in fact, he’s learning to be
a backup dancer for an ambitious trans performer named Biba (Alina
Khan). In time, Haider falls in love with Biba. (When I watched the
film in London, the audience fell in love with her, too.)

Maybe “Joyland” was banned because it depicts a queer love story,
but I don’t think so. I think the ban was a misguided attempt to
defend families, because, at the film’s heart, that is what
“Joyland” is about: a family that is struggling, a family in which
love and abuse intertwine so tightly that it’s difficult to tell
them apart, a family much like any other in the world. The members of
this family are constantly judging one another. But the film itself
does not judge the lovers, and it does not judge the family.

About three-quarters of the way through the film, Haider and Biba
share a subtle and intimate scene that was censored in Pakistan. When
I talked to people who had seen the film, whether edited or unedited,
they all seemed to ask the same question: Who was trying to fuck whom?
The question seemed to come from a kind of voyeurism about queer and
trans love. Maybe they missed the answer that’s underlined in many
places in the film: it’s your own family that fucks you, with its
preconceived gender roles. As Philip Larkin
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They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
      They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
      And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn . . .

“Joyland” manages to feel as familiar as our families are to
us—loving, ugly, full of secrets and laughter and false promises.
When Haider’s father spends an evening with a widow who lives in the
neighborhood, he is vilified and seems as hapless as his son. When
Haider helps with the chores and lives off his wife’s earnings, his
father and brother look down on him. Whereas the fantasy families of
“Maula Jatt” hack each other to pieces, this family feels real. It
suffers a thousand invisible cuts. These characters are normal, and we
can’t stand to watch.

We never meet the family that Biba was born into—only the family of
trans women that she chooses for herself. And, in this family, murder
is on everyone’s mind. In Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province alone, at
least seventy transgender people have reportedly been killed in the
past five years. Biba seems to know this. She knows that she could be
shot, because she has seen it.

Westerners are sometimes surprised to learn that many Pakistanis are
openly trans. In 2017, Pakistan issued its first passport that
recognized a third gender, X, and the following year the government
passed a mildly progressive transgender-rights law. In 2022, Sindh
required the hiring of trans employees for one in every two hundred
public-sector jobs in the province. But transgender Pakistanis are
also some of the most oppressed in our society. Trans entertainers
often perform at private parties, such as weddings and baby showers,
but their families may refuse to accept them; they may be groped on
roadsides or refused jobs as domestic workers, let alone in offices
and shops. No legislation has been able to stop the kind of vilonce
depicted in “Joyland.”

A few years ago, one of the producers of “Joyland,” Sarmad Sultan
Khoosat, directed a sublime film, “Zindagi Tamasha” (“Circus of
Life”). It, too, tells a family story. Rahat (Arif Hassan) is a
bearded man who tends to household chores and cares for his bedridden
wife. In one scene, this good-enough Muslim shakes his bum at a
wedding ceremony, and the video goes viral. Some Pakistani mullahs who
watched the trailer, however, concluded that the film was an assault
on their image. They claimed that it maligned religious scholars and
hence our religion. Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan, a far-right party
whose members are known for chanting “Death to blasphemers,”
accused Khoosat of blasphemy.

Making an independent film in Pakistan means choosing your family.
Khoosat is a national icon, having produced some of the nation’s
most popular mainstream TV shows. For “Zindagi Tamasha,” however,
he hired a first-time screenwriter and editor, a relatively unknown
group of musicians, and no bankable stars. He didn’t seek out any
outside finance and instead sold a plot of land, his life savings, to
fund the movie. It cleared the censors three times; the film’s
release was halted after the blasphemy accusations; the government
referred the film to the Council of Islamic Ideology, a constitutional
body tasked with weeding the impurities out of public life.
Khoosat’s producer and father, Irfan, went on live TV, practically
begging that his son’s life be spared. Then a senate committee
watched the film and cleared it for release. (There is still a ban in
Punjab.) But, to this day, cinema owners in Pakistan are too scared to
show “Zindagi Tamasha.”

This month, Americans will be able to watch the unedited version of
“Joyland” in theatres. Maybe they will see the film for what it
is: a sympathetic, even forgiving, depiction of family. Families are
often anchored by people who go about their business quietly. In one
scene, Mumtaz looks out a window at a neighbor who is touching
himself, and she starts to pleasure herself, too. She is quiet enough
that, at first, nobody in her household notices. She is a sexually
frustrated woman satisfying herself in the most discreet way possible.
What could be more family-friendly?

One place where “Joyland” finds joy is in self-reliant communities
that serve as surrogates for family. When the power goes out during
one of Mumtaz’s makeup jobs, her colleagues put their mobile phones
on flashlight mode. The moment she finishes the job, they burst into
applause. Later, in a beautiful theatre scene, a blackout interrupts
one of Biba’s dances. The theatre manager wants to cancel the
performance. Instead, Haider gets the audience to light up the stage
with their phones, and the show goes on.

Three years ago, I learned from my publishers in Karachi that their
office had been raided by people who claimed to work for Pakistani
intelligence. They seized the Urdu translation of my novel “A Case
of Exploding Mangoes
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The novel had been in circulation for a decade
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there had been no official objections to its contents. Although an
official from Pakistan’s best-known intelligence organization, the
I.S.I., denied my publishers’ account to the Associated Press, I
attended a meeting with one of the agency’s junior generals, during
which he tried to clear the air. He said some vaguely nice things
about the book and told me that he was only carrying out his orders.
It was obvious that he had not read it in any language.

“There is that scene in your book in which a Saudi prince is
buggering our President,” the junior general told me. This struck me
as odd, given that the novel is about the alleged assassination of a
President who, at least in the book, does not have any kind of sex.
(In one scene, he has his rear end checked for worms by a Saudi
doctor.) “In English, it was funny,” the junior general told me.
“In Urdu, it sounds very disturbing.” I didn’t have the heart to
tell him that no Saudi prince buggers our President in my novel. The
protectors of our family values, it seemed to me, had more filth in
their heads than any writer or director could come up with. ♦

* Film
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* Film Review
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* Joyland
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* Saim Sadiq
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* Pakistani Film
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* Queer Love
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* censoring
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