Review: Ten Short Films about Pakistan

The soul of Pakistan has never been filmed or televised. You could sit down and watch every single hour of programming that is broadcast on the many TV channels that cater to Pakistan round the clock. Throw in a few hundred cheese ball films that come out in that country each year. Add on top of this every single news and human interest story that comes out on American TV, and sprinkle on top all the Hollywood films that make references to Pakistani characters and locations. Watch all of this and you will get about an ounce of Pakistan’s soul. This is like trying to get your daily dose of Vitamin C by consuming two pounds of uncut Pakistani heroin.

The two hour long Karachi Kamera short film festival does not promise anything more than an ounce of Pakistan’s soul, but this time it comes without all the other mind numbing chemicals. The vehicle that you see in the festival logo is the ubiquitous motor rickshaw. Similar motorcycle taxis exist elsewhere in Asia. The Pakistani version is decked out like the personal bling bling of some ghetto celebrity, because that is exactly what it is. You will see them pass by in the background in many of the short films, but for a change they look like they belong in the shots.

There are ten very diverse films in the set. There is a short film on the mad obsession with the sport of cricket in Lahore’s ghettos. You will see Pakistan the way it has rarely been filmed; through the fast moving eyes of someone who has a deep love and appreciation for this insanity. High stakes ghetto battles in alley ways and heavy traffic give way in the early morning hours to little children who have set their alarm clocks to play among puddles at five in the morning.

One film gives a psychedelic kaleidoscopic tour of the musical career of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan. The camera seems to swim from the graffiti artists and narrow alleys in small towns to the three ring circus of Bollywood.

We meet Bijli, a Pakistani drag queen in New York, in one surprisingly touching and subtle film. Bijli has a day job, but his evenings are spent stitching glamorous outfits for himself and practicing his sexy dance routines. He comes across as a very sweet person and a devout Muslim. It is hard not to love him. He is philosophical about the indignities of being a Pakistani Muslim cross dresser. New York is not really much more tolerant either. Yet he would rather talk about how grateful he is to Allah for the opportunity to indulge in his “hobby” in this lifetime.

The film shorts are not without their flaws. Some of the subtitles have lazy translations. Some are subtle, such as Bijli’s poetic declaration that he would prefer to die as he is dancing, is translated to a more mundane desire to dance till he dies. Some are simply missing. A number of street hoodlums explain their leisurely life style of playing and gambling on cricket all day. The subtitles miss the guy who was sent to fetch yogurt by the women of his family, for example.

The film about diverse women’s lives that intersect at a beauty parlor features women that are so candid about their sexuality that they could have been lifted straight from the pages of Muslim Wakeup’s Sex and the Ummah section. Yet the dialogue and acting style comes straight from the famous plays of the state run Pakistan Television (PTV) even if the content is original and refreshing. Much as PTV plays work hard and self-consciously at realism, they have developed an unintentional dramatic paradigm of their own, like hand puppets or kabuki theatre. So a few tiny grams of mass culture heroin seep through in this one film. Feel free to just spit them out.

Karachi Kamera played this Friday night (June 25, 2004) at the Jewish Community Center. Yes, I am involved in this somehow, as are a lot of wonderful people with some great life affirming projects working under the auspices of Buniyad. The organizers made their own short film about what Americans think of the word “Karachi”.