FORBIDDEN LOVE
JOYLAND Pakistan’s taboo-tackling transgender love story….
Oscar-winning Pakistani-Canadian director Sharmeen Obaid-Chinoy once said, “Every time a filmmaker makes a film in Pakistan, they should get a medal of bravery.” Well, you really won’t get much braver than this beautiful debut by first-time filmmaker Saim Sadiq.
Joyland tells the story of Haider (Ali Junejo), a married man living in a joint family who falls for charismatic transgender dancer Biba (Alina Khan). What follows is a moving family drama that explores gender roles and sexuality through a story of forbidden love.
“It was about processing my feelings around growing up as an adult male in a patriarchal society in which the definitions of gender roles are very set, but nobody seems to be fitting into them,” Sadiq tells Teasers. “To centre the film around the trope of a love triangle – the relationship between a man, a woman and a transwoman – makes for an organic set-up to talk about these issues.”
One of the standout stars of the film is Khan, who hails from Lahore’s transgender community and manages to capture both Biba’s fierce badass-ness and her vulnerability.
In the west, there’s been ongoing controversy around straight actors playing LGBT+ roles, but for Sadiq, it was never up for debate.
“A cis actor can never pick up things that are so inherent to her,” the director explains. “She brings an authenticity and lived-in experience to the role that you’re never going to get [from a cis actor], no matter how good they are.”
As a film from a conservative Muslim country, the transgender element of the story has garnered a flurry of headlines, something which was a source of grievance for Sadiq (“I found it frustrating.”). In fact, Sadiq considers the film as much a story about Haider’s tender, almost platonic relationship with his wife, Mumtaz (Rasti Farooq), as it is about his passionate yet doomed romance with Biba. “I never looked at it as a film just about Haider and Biba, but Mumtaz as well,” he insists. “The trope of a love triangle is common in the Indian SubContinent, but is problematic [in] how it pits women against each other. In my eyes, there was a romance between Haider and Biba, but the real love story was between Haider and Mumtaz.”
At the time of the interview, the film is going through the inevitable storm of controversy, but the battle is being won thanks to a tidal wave of support on social media as the hashtag #releasejoyland went viral. “I didn’t anticipate this level of attention, and I haven’t processed it completely because it’s so fresh,” says Sadiq. “It felt like, for a month, all the country did was talk about this movie. But the support we got outweighed the hate.”
‘She brings an authenticity and lived-in experience to the role’ SAIM SADIQ