f you were to ask when Saim Sadiq, who has directed the very acclaimed Joyland, first realized his love for the arts, he would point you to the time he played ‘water’ in a school play. Turn to Rasti Farooq, and you will find that she too, was a performer at the tender age of four, her first role: the Statue of Liberty. Alina Khan found herself performing in Sadiq’s Darling in 2019, while Ali Junejo first pinged our radars as Rumi in the surrealist The Man On A Black Horse in 2013, which he both directed and acted in. While we missed our window to catch Farooq and Sadiq’s very first artistic turns, we are acquainted with both Khan and Junejo’s and can confidently tell you they’re stellar performers.

As the four speak with Instep on a sunny, breezy Karachi afternoon, they share an easy camaraderie, an understanding of how the other works, and together, give just the tiniest, slightest glimpse of what to expect from their collaboration in Joyland.

Joyland has so far been the first Pakistani film to arrive and claim a prize at the Cannes Film Festival, had critics praising it post the screening at the Toronto International Film Festival, winning yet another award at the Indian Film Festival Of Melbourne, and is also Pakistan’s official entry to the Academy Awards in the International Feature Film Category. To say Joyland has stormed the scene is an understatement. Considering that this is Sadiq’s first feature-length film, which took him around six years to complete, Joyland is a study in success and luck.

For Saim Sadiq though, the most important chapter in the life of Joyland is still to come: it’s Pakistani release.

“There will be some kind of discourse around it,” he says, “some people will appreciate it more, some will appreciate it less, some will not appreciate it at all. But that’s what happens with any film, right?”

Sadiq is quick to point out, however, that the film was not meant to be topical at all, or not in the manner in which it has generally been perceived, with everyone’s focus automatically going to Alina Khan’s character, Biba.

“The film isn’t outwardly topical or preachy in any way,” says Sadiq, “it just features a trans character, but it isn’t about the trans experience, it isn’t about, say, trans rights. The cast of Joyland is as ensemble as it gets. Biba is just one character, and just as part of the narrative as Mumtaz’s (Rasti Farooq) or Nucchi’s (Sarwat Gilani) characters.”

Rasti Farooq, who plays Mumtaz, found herself completely enamored with the script when she read it. “I laughed, I cried, I was curious,” she says. Farooq, who does a lot of theater, says she found herself “starved” for the scope of performance that Mumtaz brought. Through Mumtaz’s eyes, she saw how intelligent women who may not have the means or permission to rise to their full potential may maneuver through life. “Mumtaz and Nucchi commit these little transgressions,” she says, “things the women in my life and around me do so casually, but to these two characters, it’s a tiny rebellion.”

While Farooq may herself not have lived the kind of life Mumtaz had, Sadiq says he did “definitely borrow and steal,” from his experiences growing up in a largely patriarchal family.

“The film isn’t outwardly topical or preachy in any way,” says Sadiq, “it just features a trans character, but it isn’t about the trans experience, it isn’t about, say, trans rights. The cast of Joyland is as ensemble as it gets. Biba is just one character, and just as part of the narrative as Mumtaz’s (Rasti Farooq) or Nucchi’s (Sarwat Gilani) characters.”

“We’ve suffered through patriarchy before we were even aware that ‘patriarchy’ is a word. But the thing is, are the people who enforce patriarchy all bad?

“My family are very decent people, but they might fall back to the systems already in place, in absence of other systems,” he says.

Sadiq began writing Joyland at the start of 2016, but he found himself dissatisfied with how the story unfolded. “It was dramatically unexciting,” he says, “and it would be just too convenient to make [Salmaan Peerzada’s character] the villain. Patriarchs,” he says, “can be decent too.”

What brings the story together is the fact that Ali Junejo’s character Haider joins a dance group as one of Biba’s backup dancers, ultimately falling in love with her, but as Sadiq said before, that’s just one facet of the story, albeit the trigger of the entire narrative. Junejo, who found himself falling into character subconsciously after a four-hour-long audition and discussion, says he saw Sadiq’s mastery at work when he read through the characters and how they developed.

“Haider is a complex character,” he says. “But you see that in so many different little ways. It isn’t spring at you outright.

“Similarly, making the family’s patriarch, Rana Amanullah (Salmaan Peerzada) the bad guy was just low-hanging fruit. If I could sit down and say, ‘yes, all the ills of the world are down to this bugger’, it would be easy, but that’s the thing about this story; you can’t point your finger at any one character and say, this is who screwed it all up.”

Junejo, who has thus far disagreed that he tapped into his own experiences to play Haider, (“we’re two completely different people,” he had said earlier, “this guy doesn’t care where I come from or what I have experienced.”) says that to an extent, he can understand Haider’s motivations.

“It would give my parents immense joy if I were to be a doctor or engineer,” he says, “they would want me to have a regular income. Instead I choose to act – I might have a contract for six months, and then nothing, and I realize that one of the reasons for that is that I don’t shoot for mainstream acting jobs; I don’t care if what I’m playing is macho or butch. So in that way, I get why Haider does some of the things he does and makes the decisions he makes.”

One of Haider’s choices takes him to Biba’s dance group, where he finds aspects to himself he hadn’t considered before. Biba herself, as Alina Khan describes her, is ambitious, focused, and self-made. She wants to reach a certain station in life, and works hard to get there.

“There will be some kind of discourse around it,” says Sadiq, “some people will appreciate it more, some will appreciate it less, some will not appreciate it at all. But that’s what happens with any film, right?”

“In Haider she finds someone who maybe can help her as a partner,” says Khan. “Haider helps Biba through different things, and she feels that maybe she finally has someone she can rely on.”

Khan, who had appeared as Alina Darling in Darling, a short film by Saim Sadiq, had played a dancer auditioning for a dance group where she ultimately becomes a backup dancer. Sadiq says that of all the characters in Joyland, Biba’s was the one that was pre-cast. “Let’s just say it was because of Alina that I knew Joyland was possible.”

Sadiq states firmly that rather than being about any one thing, with one purpose, Joyland is the story of a family run in a typical manner, where there things that are ‘done’ and things that are not. In fact, in some ways Joyland might ever diverge from the beaten path, because as the director puts it, “the women in Joyland have more agency than Haider does, in some ways.”

While the cast and crew of Joyland are determined not to give away any of the story, letting an eager audience wait for November 18, when the film will see its theatrical release, as the team speaks, it seems the experience has uncovered and clarified some things for them.

Patriarchy, while it seems to be a major theme so far, is perhaps just part of the story. Maybe the story is simply that of a family, (“So tense,” says Farooq, “so many unsaid things, you’d thing if someone speaks up everything will fall apart.”) that finds itself uncomfortable speaking of anything that is considered as inappropriate or an outright abomination by society. Maybe it’s a simple love story, between Biba and Haider, between Mumtaz and Haider; maybe it’s just the way women like Nucchi and Mumtaz find little pockets of comfort in a world that doesn’t give them much space.

It’s just a story about people, how they live, how they become who they become, and where that takes them.