Hamza Bangash loves Karachi. The Canadian-Pakistani filmmaker’s most current film, Bhai, that opened to a lot interest and appreciation at the 2021 Toronto Intercontinental Film Competition, is centred in his house town where, according to him, “anything can happen”.
In truth, capricious Karachi has been the setting for all his internationally acclaimed small films so much, a retrospective of which was held in Toronto on Oct 2.
Apart from Bhai, the collection bundled Dia (2018) that gained the audience award at Locarno, 1978 (2020) that performed at the Locarno Film Pageant, and Stray Canines Come Out At Night time (2020) which was showcased at the largest festival of quick movies, Competition international du court docket metrage de Clermont-Ferrand, as nicely as at BFI London Movie Competition, Dharamshala Worldwide Movie Pageant, and KASHISH Mumbai Global Queer Film Competition.
A even now from Hamza Bangash’s 2020 shorter film, titled 1978 [Courtesy: CityLights Media]An alumnus of the Directors’ Lab programme at the Canadian Film Centre as nicely as the Locarno and Asian Filmmakers Academy, Bangash, 30, is typically cited as one of the most exciting young filmmaking voices in Pakistan, intently capturing a country in transformation.
He catalogues the spot and the modern day periods by zooming in particularly on Karachi, a city that, he thinks, pirouettes on contradictions – chaotic and irritating as properly as inspiring in equivalent measure. A spot with range of cultures and communities, nevertheless oddly constricting that presents limitless desires and hope, and fuels ambition of some and disappoints some others.
“In every single corner of Karachi, there is some conflict unfolding … Great cinema for me will come out of these conflicts and there is no close to them in Karachi,” he advised Al Jazeera.
The pulsating metropolis can also be really brutal and callous when it will come to the vulnerable. Bhai, the turbulent, taut and shifting 7-minute small, is about two brothers who have stepped out to get by themselves a food on chaotic Independence Day.
It is about how the mad hurry and rigorous sounds of the city have an affect on the head of a single of them who takes place to be on the autism spectrum and how the two reclaim the stability, understanding and equanimity in their connection, and discover pleasure in a plate of biriyani.
“It’s a film about ‘chhoti khushiyan’ (compact contentment), and about each day bravery – the kind that Karachiites have in spades,” wrote Bangash.
Hamza Bangash on the established of his film, 1978 [Courtesy: CityLights Media]Bangash himself was born in Karachi in 1991 and moved with his mother and father to Mississauga in Canada when he was nine. He came again to Pakistan when he was 15 and returned to Canada 4 yrs afterwards.
Escaping being boxed in ‘immigrant narrative’
Obtaining completed a BA (Honours) degree in Arts (phase and screen) at Queen’s College, he decided to get again to his roots yet again as an artiste at 23, initially doing the job in visual arts and theatre prior to turning to filmmaking.
He believed the multiplicity of stories that Pakistan opened him would stop him from being boxed in the “immigrant narrative” that could have confined him overseas. So he made the decision to have the very best of both of those the worlds, with a foot just about every in Pakistan and Canada.
A voracious viewer of cinema, Bangash admires legends these types of as Swedish actress Ingrid Bergman, Spanish director Pedro Almodovar and Indian legend Satyajit Ray. In truth, it was Ray’s Aranyer Din Ratri (Times and Nights in the Forest) that motivated him to shoot Bhai in black and white, “to evoke the shades of gray in the brothers’ lives”.
In his short stint in cinema so much, Bangash has tried to take a look at a vast range of unconventional and contentious themes that in any other case typically get brushed less than the carpet.
A however from Bangash’s Dia [Courtesy: CityLights Media]Dia requires the viewers up shut and individual into the earth of two females and promotions with the theme of coping with grief. The 11-moment short, Stray Canines Occur Out At Night, is about an uncle-nephew duo, what sexual intercourse work entails for them, the health problems it leaves them exposed to, and how like strays, they are handled like discards of the society.
The film 1978 discounts with the marginalisation of Lenny, a Goan-Christian rock star, all through the speedy Islamisation of Pakistan in the late 1970s.
The 17-moment movie provides to mild his insecurity, vulnerability, angst as effectively as his refusal to reinvent himself as a point out-sanctioned singer, his assertion of his identification, and the outright refusal to stay a lie – a cautionary tale about the repercussions for the artistes and the minorities in the encounter of a collusion in between point out and religion.
Critique of jingoistic nationalism
All of Bangash’s films critique jingoistic nationalism – possibly head on or obliquely.
“There is this view that if you are patriotic, you can’t say anything at all negative about your nation … If you are factually reporting horrific incidents that could be happening in your country, you are claimed to be defaming the country,” he advised Al Jazeera.
That, for him, is the scariest issue about blind patriotism – the advocacy versus any essential reaction to the point out. “When you really do not have essential pondering, you create dictators and fascists. That is a lifestyle that has extended been nurtured in South Asia. It is a little something that we deal with every single working day,” he states.
Contrary to preferred interpretation, for Bangash, the best act of patriotism is striving to increase the nation, for which you to start with require to establish the challenges and be equipped to converse about them with candour and fearlessness.
“That for me is a massive portion about what media or cinema can do. [It can] get persons to watch challenges from various lenses and perspectives,” he suggests. In other words, sensitise and help open and democratise the public’s being familiar with of the difficulties.
A nonetheless from Bangash’s brief, Bhai [Courtesy: CityLights Media]Breaking limitations
For Bangash, another purpose of cinema, and arts in basic, is to crack barriers and provide those on the margins to centre stage with empathy and dignity. “Cinema makes it possible for you to get in the footwear of persons who don’t have a voice,” he states.
So, Bangash’s cinema is not just all aesthetics but also arrives riding on social duty. For instance, he designed an attention-grabbing use of diegetic audio of the metropolis in Bhai by trying to capture the stage of sounds in the busiest of the streets downtown in the course of the center of the working day.
For him, it has a much larger relevance. “I needed to seize that stage of intensity from the lens of any individual who is differently abled. What it could signify to them. What happens to that character in that space when you don’t have the means to process the audio and the problem all over you,” he advised Al Jazeera.
The social consciousness did not end at that. Ayan Javaid, the actor who performs the autistic brother in Bhai, identifies himself as otherwise abled, a scarce occasion of empathetic and authentic casting in the Pakistani movie business.
Bhai was unveiled throughout the world on YouTube on Oct 10 to mark the Globe Mental Wellness Day.
Bangash labored with Specific Olympics Pakistan alongside with the mental health NGO, Pakistan Institute of Dwelling and Discovering (Pill), all through the film’s casting system.
A nonetheless from Bangash’s Stray Puppies Come Out At Night time [Courtesy: CityLights Media]Capsule has developed Dia, Stray Canines and Bhai along with London-dependent govt producer, Mina Husain. For Stray Pet dogs, Bangash also labored with a Pakistani male health and fitness NGO as component of his study, but under the problem of anonymity.
“It was about developing believe in and demonstrating that we are not right here to sensationalise. We are not in this article to develop exploitative cinema. We are here to generate a story that shines a light-weight on the conditions that these individuals are likely through and how individuals situations came to be,” Bangash informed Al Jazeera.
Up coming venture on women’s rights
The spirit of social conscience carries on in his new enterprise. Impressed from the escalating women’s legal rights motion in Pakistan, Bangash is now set to explore the plan of generating a risk-free area for women of all ages in his initial attribute film, named Mariam.
The film goes back to his brief Dia and is about two women, 1 younger and the other aged.
“It is about the challenges they are both equally going through at their own sites in life, how they navigate equally institutional as perfectly as societal discrimination and get over it,” says Bangash.
The project won the AFA-MPA award at Busan Intercontinental Film Festival 2019 and was picked for Berlinale Talent Job Market place 2020. The function movie is remaining supported by Telefilm’s 2020 Talent to View programme and the Canada Arts Council.
Bangash suggests it is a horror film, a genre he enjoys a great deal but finds a dearth of in South Asia, barring exceptional Indian illustrations these kinds of as Tumbbad, directed by Anand Gandhi and Rahi Anil Barve.
“What I like about horror exclusively is that it will allow the victim to gain. Horror also has a very long legacy of championing feminist tales. A film like Rosemary’s Baby or The Babadook will allow its woman protagonist company in a society that is hyper-masculine and hyper-patriarchal,” he claims.
Mariam, he promises, would be an empowering South Asian feminist horror film. No prizes for guessing the movie would be set in his everlasting favorite metropolis Karachi.
