A Queer Pakistani Social Drama is Finally Freed

It's a stunning and methodical work of social realism that weighs heavy on the heart. In 2020, it was one of the best films from all of South Asia, and its impact has only been magnified by the surrounding controversy. In its opening scenes, elderly protagonist Rahat Khawaja (Arif Hassan)—a husband, father, and respected Muslim poet in a devout Lahore community—attends a wedding, and recalls how his father would beat him black and blue for the crime of wearing his mother’s scarf and dancing before a mirror. Now surrounded by friends, he’s egged on to dance once more, to a song from an old Punjabi movie he enjoys in secret, a touching sequence in which he briefly throws off the shackles of social rigidity. With a scarf now tied around his waist, he shakes his hips in a manner that is, at once, semi-joking, yet entirely freeing. Khoosat and cinematographer Khizer Idrees capture him from below, against the wedding’s bright lights and decorations overhead, as if his effeminate twirling had transported him to some floating, dreamlike realm—and that’s that. Khawaja returns home to his ailing wife, Farkhanda (Samiya Mumtaz), and his TV producer daughter Sadaf (Eman Suleman), who are none the wiser. But unbeknownst to him, someone at the wedding shot a video of his innocent jig and uploaded it to Facebook.

The post goes viral, which leads to memes and relentless mocking (albeit with some support; he’s essentially a local celebrity). But the mocking soon turns to heated derision from religious clerics, and bitter shame from his own family. How, they wonder, could a pious man of social standing debase himself like this? How could he so thoughtlessly paint a target not only on his own back, but on theirs? The dance, like the film itself, yields an online firestorm that throws into question both modern Muslim identity as well as the place of queerness and gender binaries in contemporary Pakistan. Khawaja may be an ostensibly straight man with a wife and child, but questions of his gender and sexuality are thrown in his face in embarrassingly public ways, often by once-friendly neighbors who turn vicious at the drop of a hat.

In "Zindagi Tamasha," Rahat Khawaja (Arif Hassan) finds himself ostracized from his community.

Still frame of "Zindagi Tamasha"

But despite his piety, Khawaja is far from saintly. A handful of early scenes concern the eviction of hijra characters—a community of transgender dancers—from a local building by police, an event towards which Khawaja shows apathy at best (he eventually meets one of these trans women again, in a moment of thorny mutual recognition). When he’s made to be a social outcast, he finds unexpected acceptance from local, closeted queer folks who seek to help him, since they understand the outsidership he feels, but on whom he projects his anger in return (Khoosat himself cameos in one of these scenes, as a burlesque dancer performing in secret). Khawaja detests the idea of queerness, and yet, he’s forced to live within its secret borders, and made to confront the rigidities that harm gay and straight people, and trans and cis people, alike. All the while, his faith in his community is flung into crisis; a lifetime of dedication to the Quran isn’t enough to buy back the respect of his conservative peers. The more that Khawaja is spurned by friends and acquaintances, the more Hassan carries that pain in the character’s weary eyes as he reaches the end of his rope. Khoosat captures him practically in suspended animation, using lengthy shots of reflective, introspective stillness, in which his dejection settles quietly and heavily, making its way to the pit of the viewer’s stomach.

There’s an inherent hypocrisy at play, given the love and godly acceptance that Khawaja and the local community elders usually preach, just as there was hypocrisy to the backlash itself. Author Khadim Hussain Rizvi, founder of Pakistan’s extremist Tehreek-e-Labbaik party and supporter of the country’s blasphemy laws, labeled the film as “blasphemous” for its critique of ulama—learned clerics who harness and teach knowledge of Islam—even though a claim like this would likely constitute blasphemy itself, since it equates ulama to holy figures like Allah and the Prophet Mohammad. Such a claim, however, would likely not be persecuted under Pakistan’s blasphemy laws, owing to the long-standing alignment between Islamic fundamentalism and the state, though Zindagi Tamasha also treads carefully in its depiction of Islam, likely in order to avoid clerical ire in the first place. (Any time the Prophet Muhammad is mentioned, the film’s English subtitles follow it with “PBUH” meaning “Peace Be Unto Him.”)

From left, Ali Kureshi, Eman Suleman, and Arif Hassan as Danish, Sadaf, and Rahat Khawaja in "Zindagi Tamasha."

Still frame of "Zindagi Tamasha"

In fact, Zindagi Tamasha was actually cleared by all three of Pakistan’s film censor boards with only minor edits and a handful of words bleeped out, yet the filmmakers were never given a concrete reason for its release being repeatedly pulled; an apt reflection of the circus-like backlash to which the movie’s title refers. It’s this cleared version that Khoosat has put out on YouTube for free (along with banking information for optional donations), while his uncensored director’s cut—which is practically identical in runtime, at just more than two hours—can be rented on Vimeo.

A tale of indignity, and a film that gradually drains color from its characters’ faces and surroundings, Zindagi Tamasha is an apt aesthetic embodiment of what it feels like to stew helplessly in personal betrayal. This betrayal comes not only at the hands of neighbors and loved ones, but at the hands of societies, communities, and the state itself. It is also a rousing cinematic success story, whose bittersweet release deserve to be celebrated—alongside the Khoosat-produced trans romantic drama Joyland, which faced similar backlash last year—for the resilience of its cast and crew, who don’t deserve to have been made artistic revolutionaries, but who have worn the label and its consequences with their heads held high.