The change of guard and class in Pakistani films
Nadeem F. Paracha Published 38 minutes ago
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The new-wave of Pakistani films are urban middle-class mediations on life, love, faith and politics.
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Till about the late 1970s, the Pakistan film industry was regularly releasing an average of 80 films a year. In fact, there were also periods when the industry put out over a hundred films in a single year.
And then, it all stopped.
In July 1977, the populist regime of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (Pakistan Peoples Party) was toppled in a military coup masterminded by General Ziaul Haq.
In 1979, Zia oversaw the execution of Bhutto through a sham trial and consolidated his grip over power.
Zia’s was a reactionary dictatorship. He went after his detractors with concentrated ruthlessness.
After Bhutto’s toppling and hanging, the era of populist extroversion came to a close, giving way to social introversion that had little to do with self-reflection, and more with the need to hide one’s political and social self in an era of open religious propagation and reactive legislation that was directly opposed to the 1970s populist bearings.
One cultural symptom of this social and cultural rollback was the abrupt collapse of the Pakistani film industry.
As if all of a sudden Urdu films that till 1979 had been doing good business rapidly started to lose its main (middle-class) audiences.
One of the primary reasons for this was the social and cultural introversion that the country’s urban middle-classes started to slide into ever since the late 1970s.
This can also explain the rapid proliferation of the VCR – a machine that kept many Pakistanis, including regular cinema goers, comfortably stationed in their homes and enjoying smuggled Indian films on video tapes away from the cultural, social and political fall-outs of Ziaul Haq’s rampaging ‘Islamisation project’ impacting life outside their homes.
Another prominent reason for the Pakistani film industry’s growing commercial and creative woes was the implementation of a new censor policy.
Interestingly though, these policies and restrictions that barred filmmakers from showing ‘excessive sexual content and violence,’ seemed only to have been targeted at Urdu films because there was a two-fold growth in the number of Punjabi and Pashto films, in spite of the fact that they were studded with sexual raunchiness and anarchic violence.
The rising popularity of Punjabi cinema was also symptomatic of the changing class dynamics of film audiences.
Till the late 1970s, the middle-classes constituted the bulk of this audience, but as these started to dramatically recede after 1979, the vacuum was filled by film-goers from the urban working classes in the cities, and the peasants in the semi-rural areas.
Thus, this was also the beginning of the making of Punjabi films based on populist rural themes of revenge and honour, as Urdu films based on the more urbane themes began to vanish after losing its core audiences to social and cultural inertia, and consequently, to the VCR.
Not that the working and peasant classes weren't film-goers before, but they outnumbered the middle-classes in this respect in the 1980s till they too began to vanish by the end of that decade.
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A few valiant efforts were made by some film-makers in the 1990s to revive the industry and prompt the middle-classes to return to the cinemas.
But the euphoria was short-lived. By the early 2000s, an industry that once produced an average of 80 films annually was now struggling to even churn out more than two films a year.
During the ‘liberal’ military dictatorship of General Pervez Musharraf (1999-2008), cinema owners in Pakistan complained that they would be forced to close down the few cinemas left in the country if the government didn't lower the entertainment tax.
They lamented that since the Pakistani film industry had gone creatively and commercially bankrupt, the cinemas were struggling to remain in business solely on the strength of Hollywood films.
When prompted by the Musharraf regime to come up with suggestions, the owners asked for something that was almost deemed impossible to agree to i.e. Allowing the import and screening of Indian (Bollywood) films in Pakistani cinemas.
The practice of Pakistani cinemas screening Indian films (and vice versa) was common till 1965, or before Pakistan banned the exhibition of Indian films after a war between the two countries that year.
Decades later, after giving much thought, the government finally gave the green signal and cinema owners began to screen latest Bollywood films in Pakistani cinemas.
Though cinema owners were once again reporting profits, the decision was vehemently criticised and lambasted by established Pakistani film-makers and artistes.
They claimed that the import of Indian films was the last nail in the coffin of the Pakistani film industry. The cinema owners and supporters of the new policy retaliated by suggesting that the industry was as good as dead, and even when it did produce a film or two, they were substandard and destined to flop.
But as the traditional scions of the industry were busy waving their fists, enigmatic TV director, Shoaib Mansoor, rolled up his sleeves and decided to actually make use of the fact that the middle-classes had begun to return to the cinemas, albeit to only watch Indian films.
He decided to make a film that would not only be a departure in style compared to the Pakistani films of yore, but would also be marketed keeping in mind a generation of young middle-class cine-goers with little or no memory of a time when visiting cinemas (to watch Pakistani films) was quite the norm.
Most Urdu films during the peak of the industry (in the ‘60s and ‘70s) were cinematic meditations on certain social, domestic and romantic issues that middle and lower-middle-class Pakistanis experienced in their daily lives.
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But Mansoor was making a film for an audience that had grown up watching lavish Bollywood thrillers, rom-coms and pot-boilers (on DVD). However, this was also an audience who was (like every Pakistani) facing the brunt of the religion-motivated violence and extremism that had mushroomed in Pakistan after the tragic 9/11 episode in New York, that saw Pakistan enter the ‘War on Terror’ on the side of the United States.
So he decided to make a film that directly tackled the issue of extremism and the subsequent ideological and moral confusion that had begun to plague a number of young Pakistanis after the 9/11 tragedy. He called his film, Khuda Kay Liye (In The Name of God).
Mansoor not only departed from the ways of old Pakistani films in style, plot and marketing; he also almost completely bypassed the remnants of the country’s film establishment that were still seen as being authorities on the film business in the country.
The film was a surprise hit and it competed well with the Indian films in the local cinemas – but on its own terms.
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Shoaib Mansoor
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In doing this, it set the precedent for the young lot that followed Mansoor’s example to compete with the ‘Indian invasion,’ not by producing cheap copies of Bollywood films or simply by whining about how they were killing the local film industry; but by making films that attempted to aspire their own (Pakistani) identity.
Thanks to the arrival of Indian films and the subsequent emergence of Pakistan’s new-wave of cinema, owning and running a cinema has once again become a feasible business in the country.
Ironically, as hoards of religious fanatics were burning down a series of Karachi’s old cinemas (Nishat, Bambino, Capri and Prince) in 2013 (due to a controversial ‘anti-Islam film’ on YouTube), brand new multiplex cinemas were mushrooming in the country.
The last major conventional cinema to be constructed in Pakistan was Prince Cinema in Karachi in 1976. One of the first multiplex cinemas to emerge in the country was also in Karachi in the early 2000s. Today, all the major cities of the country have spacious and hi-tech multiplexes.
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A multiplex in Karachi
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Capri – one the last few traditional cinemas operating in Karachi
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But as the urban middle-classes were once again returning to watch their films on the big screens in large numbers, one did wonder, what were film enthusiasts from the working classes up to now?
Ticket prices at the multiplexes are way out of their reach, but cinema owners claim that these classes are now enjoying Indian, Pakistani and Hollywood films in the few old, traditional cinemas that have managed to survive.
That’s why it was sad to see religious fanatics tearing down what were perhaps the last haunts of the working-classes where (like in the old days), they could afford a ticket to sit in an air-conditioned hall, forget about their many economic and social struggles for a while and submerge themselves in a dream splashed across a 70mm screen.
Class conflicts
If you ever catch a Pakistani film of the 1960s and 1970s on a DVD, you will notice that most films shared visual and contextual commonalities in their portrayal of rich people.
For example, the homes of the rich (from the inside) in the films always had a massive drawing room with a large A-shaped twin staircase. A rich father would almost always be in a suit or a nightgown and thick glasses, holding a walking stick and chewing on a pipe.
His daughter could often be seen skipping down the twisty staircase in a white mini-skirt, rolling a badminton racket in her hands and announcing, ‘Daddy, I go keelub and play badminton.’
At the 'keelub' (club) she would venture from the badminton court to the bar where the lecherous owner of the club (usually played by the late great Aslam Parvez) would make her sip some whiskey.
A mere sip would suffice for the girl to go dashing towards the dance floor to do the most anarchic version of the ‘hippie shake’ this side of the ‘70s, before passing out.
She would then usually wake up to realise that the lewd club owner had raped her in her drunken state.
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Frolicking at the ‘keelub’: Sangeeta and Aslam Parvez in 1976’s ‘Society Girl.’
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It is true that nightclubs, discotheques and bars did a roaring business in Pakistan till they were closed down in April 1977, but in no way were they anything like how filmmakers depicted them in their cinematic farces.
It was simply a case of filmmakers of a particular class perceiving the lifestyle of another class that they found to be distant. But that didn’t stop them from undertaking some pretty wild guesswork.
Even during the commercial and quantitative peak of the Pakistan film industry between the late 1960s and mid-1970s, a majority of filmmakers came from petty-bourgeoisie backgrounds.
So, in spite of the fact that almost all of them enjoyed alcoholic beverages and often made use of the figurative casting couch to ‘discover new (female) acting talent,’ they mostly banked on the inherent reactive conservatism of the petty-bourgeoisie to understand and portray the morality (or lack thereof) of the upper-classes.
What one saw on the screen in this respect was actually how the petty-bourgeoisie saw and understood a particular class.
In the same way, these filmmakers also had their own particular understanding of the working-classes and the ‘dispossessed.’
It was again largely based on petty-bourgeoisie perceptions of the poor who were portrayed as being entirely fatalistic (which was depicted as an admirable trait), very religious, self-pitying (yet honourable), and they hardly ever aspired to move up the class and social ladder, remaining content in their poverty (because money caused existential and spiritual illnesses). After all, look what it did to the lass who went venturing out to play badminton at the keelub.
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The poor in Pakistani films before 1980s: Fatalistic, self-pitying and hardly ever aspiring to move up the class and social ladder, remaining content in their poverty.
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Two major hits of the 1970s impeccably portray the said mind-set: Miss Hippie (1974) andMohabbat Zindagi Hai (1975).
The rapidly changing and ‘loosening’ dynamics of 1970s’ romance with various social and political aspects of liberalism that, (in Pakistan), generated a rather crackling cultural aura when it came together with the populism of the ZA Bhutto regime, set into motion a discourse (especially among the urban petty-bourgeoisie) that questioned the limits of the emerging liberal trend within the country’s middle-class youth.
The first shot in this respect in Pakistani cinema was fired by 1974’s Miss Hippie.
The ‘social revolution’ that the hippie counterculture eventually achieved in the West was usually seen as a cultural threat (by filmmakers) in both India and Pakistan at the time.
The overall message of Miss Hippie suggests that a patriarchal society is superior, and thus when a patriarch fails, especially due to his liking for ‘decadent’ western abominations such as alcohol and liberalism, the whole family/nation collapses.
That’s what happens to veteran actor Santosh in Miss Hippie.
He is a rich man with a taste for whisky and partying at nightclubs. He is thus a bad example for his impressionable young daughter (played by Shabnam), who too becomes a drunkard and a frequent ‘keelub’ visitor. Scolded by her helpless mother (played by Sabiha), Shabnam runs away from home, only to be picked up by a friendly ‘love guru.’
The guru is the archetypal ‘70s hippie dude leading a group of hash-smoking and dancing hippies. Of course, this means an attack on the pure traditions of ‘mashriqi mu’ashira’ (eastern culture); a threat that gets worse when we find out that the guru also runs a drug smuggling ring that is smuggling in hashish from the West.
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A scene from 1974’s ‘Miss Hippie’: Shabnam plays a ‘stoned tune’ to a fellow Pakistani hippie whose hair (inexplicably) turns blonde.
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Of course, the film conveniently forgets the fact that much of the hashish was being smuggled out of Pakistan by Pakistanis and not the other way round. In fact, some of the ‘best hashish’ was being produced in Afghanistan and Pakistan at the time and then being smuggled into Europe. Enter the time’s cinematic heart-throb, Nadeem, playing an undercover cop who infiltrates the junkie-hippie group to report on how hippies were planning to contaminate innocent young Pakistanis with hashish and an assortment of vulgarities.
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The film passionately puts forth the breakthrough idea (and/or a xenophobic notion?) that it is the adoption of alien culture that is harming Pakistan, whereas ‘local culture’ (as interpreted by the urban petty-bourgeois), is its saviour.
In the end Nadeem destroys the sinister hippie group and rescues Shabnam from the clutches of drugs, decadence and obscenity.
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Cover of the soundtrack LP of 'Miss Hippy': Maybe it was the size of the flares of Shabnam’s bell-bottoms that triggered a moral panic among many.
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Taking the ‘don’t let women venture beyond the kitchen’ warning and anti-hippie fanfare a step further was 1975’s mega-hit, Mohabbat Zindagi Hai (Love is Life).
The film follows a modern young woman (actress Mumtaz) frequenting nightclubs and other such places of unparalleled wickedness, and having no respect for her own sacrosanct culture. In comes actor Waheed Murad, playing an England-returned Pakistani who is also the fiancé of the independent-minded (and thus sleazy?) Mumtaz.
Waheed, however, is the epitome of eastern virtue and is shocked to see what has become of his old sweetheart. He decides to enter club life to have a shot at slowly making Mumtaz realise the follies of western culture. Wonder what on earth was he doing in England?
However, when he finally succeeds in making Mumtaz see the light, he himself falls prey to the manipulative ways of the club, as if it wasn’t a nightclub but a nocturnal cult of brainwashed zombie alcoholics! Ah, but is it all an act by the wily eastern fox?
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Mohabat Zindagi Hai took one back to the notorious keelub haunted by zombie alcoholics. Or so it seemed.
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The reformed Mumtaz at once switches from wearing jeans to adorning shalwar-kameez, and from spouting free-for-all-English (“Eeeevverrrybaady, let’s enjeeayes!”), she suddenly starts speaking in top-notch rhetorical Urdu!
Though populist-liberalism was at its crest in the Pakistani society of the 1970s, defensive films like Miss Hippie and Mohabbat Zindagi Hai were portraying an undercurrent of fear boiling beneath the many liberal pretensions of urban society.
This fear (mostly affecting the middle and lower-middle-class sections), reflected a concern that saw society getting carried away by the liberal tides of the time and in the process eroding the comforting economics and sociology of the ‘joint family system’ which, many feared, was gradually being replaced by ‘Western’ notions of social and domestic independence.
Interestingly though, if the year 1977 can be pin-pointed as the year when Pakistan’s film industry began its decline, it was in this year that the scene produced what is still perhaps the most successful Urdu film.
The film was Aaina (Mirror) in which a trendy and rich young woman (played by Shabnam), falls in love with an educated lower-middle-class man (played by Nadeem), and after defying her disapproving father, marries the man. The father (played by Talish), eventually comes around to finally approving the union, but keeps offering gifts to her daughter (furniture, TV, air-conditioner, etc.).
This leaves the not-so-rich hero feeling as if his young wife’s father is mocking his lowly financial status. In between, the couple have a child (a son), but soon he is without a mother when the woman walks out, accusing the husband of being close-minded (if not downright paranoid). Though till now the film is sympathetic to the whole idea of a modern young Pakistani woman using her own mind in social and domestic affairs, the sympathy turns into a question when we see her walking out on her man and that too without the son.
The question now was whether such a display of independence (especially by women), may also end up making them behave selfishly and rashly?
After a lot of histrionics in which we see the lower-middle-class but proud husband trying to raise the stranded child without a mother, and the mother gradually coming down from her pedestal of independence (thanks to maternal instincts now kicking in more often than before), the couple are finally reunited. However, the film maintains an unprecedented attack on social conservatism (especially if it stems from financial wealth), when it is revealed that the woman’s father had been trying to sabotage the marriage right from the beginning.
The revelation inspired the exhibition of an unprecedented scene never before dared in a Pakistani (or for that matter, an Indian), film at the time. When the heroine realises how her father had destroyed her marriage and kept her away from her son, she lands a tight slap on the father’s chubby cheeks.
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Nadeem and Shabnam in 1977’s Aaina: The most successful Urdu film ever made.
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It was a bold and radical move by the director (Nazrul Islam). No sub-continental film had dared to incapacitate the high-strung and sacred notion of parenthood to such an extent. The slap also expressed the modern, young youth’s more aggressive retaliation against manipulative social conservatism, even though the heroin had to become a married woman and a young mother to be able to make such a drastic move.
Aaina was a massive hit. In fact it remains to be Pakistan’s most successful film to date. Opening in various cinemas in March 1977, the film ran for a staggering 400 weeks. It was played for the last time at Karachi’s Scala cinema in 1982 - a full four years after it was first released.
The new pack
What I am getting at here is that the reason why the recent round of Pakistani films are looking and sounding like complete departures from the films of yore is because the changing of the film-making guard in the industry has also witnessed a change in the class of the filmmakers.
The majority of new filmmakers are coming from modern middle-class backgrounds.
They grew up holding a somewhat one-dimensional nostalgic view of the once thriving film industry, but this hasn't stopped them from being more academically exposed to the creative, social and economic aspects of Indian cinema, Hollywood, and to the ebb and flow of trends in this context in the more arty European and Iranian cinema.
Unlike the dwindling old guard, the new filmmakers have understood that the cinematic morality of bygone Pakistani filmmakers (if repeated) would not only become self-parodies, but actually endorse a mind-set that the new filmmakers want to challenge in their films.
After all, the new lot of filmmakers have no memory or experience of a Pakistan where religion hardly ever ventured outside of the mosque, a shrine or home.
Instead, they grew up in times in which Pakistan, in matters of state-backed, evangelical and militant variants of ‘Islamisation,’ have continued to mutate, offering them only cultural restrictions and even a threat of violence to anyone attempting to question this mutation.
That’s why even those among the new filmmakers who want to simply construct an entertaining slab of commercial cinema, cannot escape from commenting on matters like religious extremism, moral hypocrisy, political corruption, etc.
But if the filmmakers of yore who had seen and related certain social and domestic issues through the eyes of the time’s petty-bourgeoisie, the new lot is doing so with urbane middle-class lenses.
In the last 15 years or so and in the context of moral perceptions, the ever-growing urban middle-classes in Pakistan can (roughly) be divided into three sets of people.
The first set is conservative and has increasingly drifted towards the call of evangelical strands of the faith. The second set likes to think itself to be ‘moderate’ and asserts itself to take a ‘middle-ground’ between the conservatives and the liberals; and the third set is seen and perceived to be overtly secular and too permissively liberal.
It is the ‘moderate’ view that is being weaved into the plots and imagery of the new Pakistani films.
Shoaib Mansoor, in both of his films (Khuda Kay Liye and Bol), offers ‘moderate Islam’ as the tool to challenge the extremist strands of faith.
For example, in Khuda Kay Liye, one of the most prominent scenes is that of a ‘moderate’ moulvi (played by Naseeruddin Shah) responding to the intransigent arguments aired by a radical mullah. It’s still mullah versus mullah, though. Or the good mullah versus the bad one.
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Famous court scene from 'Khuda Kay Liye' that pitched a good cleric with a bad one.
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Another prevalent theme in the discourse of the new Pakistani urban middle-classes is that of the evils of feudalism.
Though, in spite of the fact that renowned economists like Akbar Zaidi, and noted authors such as Hamida Khoro, have repeatedly demonstrated that classic Pakistani feudalism is a rapidly receding phenomenon and has been losing political and economic ground due to rapid urbanisation, feudalism has continued to be rhetorically denounced by the middle-classes as one of the main forces pitched against the country’s socio-political progress.
That’s why one saw director Iram Parveen weave a tale of female emancipation and a woman’s fight against myopia and male chauvinism by placing her heroine against a feudal lord in Josh(Passion) – even though the feudal lord’s character was an unwitting stereotype and a caricature of the urban middle-class perception of feudalism.
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Then there is Mansoor Mujahid’s Lamha (Moment), which decides to simply stick to bringing to the big screen an emotional drama addressing loss, grief and the absence of communication; seemingly an attempt to exhibit that, indeed, the modern, ‘westernised’ and seemingly distant sections of the urban upper-middle-classes too are as human and emotionally vulnerable as any other Pakistani. The rich hurt as well, y’know.
This is important, because in the films of the populist and extroverted 1970s, the said class was reduced to being a bunch of one-dimensional caricatures of amorality and exploitation and even today is often mocked and ridiculed for being cut off from the ground realities besieging Pakistan. Mujahid gives this class a sympathetic look in Lamha.
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As Pakistan continues to slide in stature in the eyes of the world due to what it has been facing in the shape of political corruption, extremist violence and due to the the government’s lukewarm response to address such mishaps, middle-class Pakistan has responded to this by often exhibiting an overt sense of patriotism, and an obsession to popularise the need to have ‘positive thinking.’
Humayun Saeed’s Mein Hoon Shahid Afridi (I Am Shahid Afridi) and Ismail Jillani’s Chambaili are based on exactly these two neo-middle-class traits. On a cinematic level both work rousingly well, as does Waar (Strike).
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Men, cricket (and sometimes women).
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But whereas, Main Hoon Shahid Afridi goes about its patriotic business by suggesting how sport (in this case cricket) can inspire a young generation to achieve a meaningful existentialist disposition and relevance in the midst of the chaos plaguing Pakistan, Chambaili attaches its patriotism to having a new political ideology.
Thus, it encourages young Pakistanis to band together and challenge the cynicism and corruption that reigns supreme in the country’s politics. It glorifies the creation of an almost messianic ideology that wags its finger and waves its fists at ‘fake democracy’ and at the usual caricatures of debauchery i.e. corrupt politicians, evil feudal lords, etc.
In fact at times it mistakes the fragrance of fascism to be the flower of freedom!
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Mistaking the fragrance of fascism to be the flower of freedom?
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Waar on the other hand is Pakistan’s delayed version of Rambo and not much should be seen into this other than the fact that it’s a high octane action flick but the one that lionises the Pakistan military’s conflict with religious militants, especially those being ‘funded by enemy states.’
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Shan in Waar: A high-octane fusion of Bond and Rambo.
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But as more and more filmmakers from this class are continuing to extend this extraordinary new (and revivalist) run of Pakistani films, the scope of mediation and perceptions in this respect are broadening as well. This was quite apparent in Farjad Nabi’s Zinda Bhaag.
Zinda Bhaag is very much part and parcel of the class make-up and sociology of Pakistan’s new-wave cinema, in which films play like stark art-house mediations on life but bear the soul of lively commercial cinema.
However, unlike their new-wave contemporaries, directors Farjad Nabi not only entrenched his film outside the confines of middle-class settings, their main characters also come from lower-middle/working-class backgrounds.
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The story is founded on the ubiquitous obsession of Pakistanis from these classes (especially from the Punjab) who (illegally) make their way into European countries for the purpose of earning a lot more money than they ever could in Pakistan.
But as more and more filmmakers from this class are continuing to extend this extraordinary new (and revivalist) run of Pakistani films, the scope of mediation and perceptions in this respect are broadening as well. Just as Pakistani films in the past had become petty-bourgeoisie perceptions of life, love, morality and society, the new-wave of Pakistani films are urban middle-class mediation on life, love, faith and politics.
Nadeem F. Paracha is a cultural critic and senior columnist for Dawn Newspaper and Dawn.com
He tweets @NadeemfParacha
He tweets @NadeemfParacha
The views expressed by this blogger and in the following reader comments do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the Dawn Media Group.
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