‘I made the first iteration of The Queen of My Dreams before I even knew I was a film-maker,” says Fawzia Mirza of the many years it took to direct her wildly ambitious genre-hopping, time-travelling debut feature. It all began in 2006. She was working as an actor in Chicago, and coming out as queer. She kept “trying to reconcile being queer, being Muslim, and loving Bollywood romance”, a combination that struck her then as impossible. She started work on a video art piece that reflected on Bollywood classics through a queer perspective. A friend suggested they develop it into a short film.
“That was the beginning of my love affair with the film festival space,” she says over a video call from her study in Los Angeles, a busy bookshelf and the movie’s colourful poster in view. “I found this community that I didn’t even know existed. My voice mattered. People were like, ‘We want to hear more queer Muslim stories.’ And I hadn’t gotten that validation or acceptance anywhere else yet.” As for her doubts about whether she could be a queer Muslim Bollywood fan? Making that film “helped me see that the answer is yes. Of course I can be all this at once.”
That celebration of our capacity to be many things at once is present in Mirza’s new film, a semi-autobiographical story about a second-generation immigrant reuniting with family in Karachi. The Canadian actor Amrit Kaur (known for her role as Bela from hit US sitcom The Sex Lives of College Girls) plays Azra, a young woman studying acting in Toronto in the 90s, where she lives with her girlfriend. The sudden death of her father sees her on the next flight to Pakistan, where tensions flare between her and her conservative mother, Mariam.
Tales of fraught homecomings are a common feature in films about second-generation immigrants. The Queen of My Dreams begins in this vein, before taking a surprising, delightful leap to Karachi in 1969, all vivid colour and shift dresses and Beatlemania. That timeline follows a young Mariam – also played by Kaur. Then there’s another time-and-space jump to rural Canada’s Nova Scotia in the 80s, where a young Azra and her parents try to fit into their predominantly white town to exquisitely awkward comic effect. Tying it together is a fanciful musical tribute to the 1969 Bollywood epic Aradhana, and its lead actor, the famed Sharmila Tagore, who Mirza sees as a cultural touchstone for women of her mother’s generation.
The film’s sprawling breath reflects Mirza’s intense personal investment in the project, and she had to hone its focus. “I had to ask myself, what is the non-negotiable in this story for me?” she says. “And it was [showing] 1969 Karachi, Pakistan, more than anything else.” She partly made the film to try to “understand my mother. And try to understand what happened before me. I don’t know all the stories of my mother. I don’t know all the stories of Pakistan of that era. People don’t talk about it. There’s a line in the film: ‘In order to move forward, we have to sort of forget the past.’” Though it struck Mirza that that era “was romantic and transitory. I also realised I’ve never seen it on screen before. Never.”
When Amrit Kaur got the script, the actor “got excited, and then scared”. (Kaur emerges on the call late, and is extremely apologetic. “Nothing happened except for me missing my alarm. That’s all that happened,” she says from her place in Toronto sheepishly, with breezy charm, before answering questions with a quiet intensity.) Kaur had to learn Urdu and Indian classical dance for both roles, but it was their emotional demands that affected her the most. “Because it’s so personal, I felt the responsibility to tell the truth not only for myself, but also for other south Asians.” She went to Italy with her acting group and coach, the controversial Michèle Lonsdale-Smith. Kaur was struck by how the film told the experience of “being queer as a south Asian; I am queer”. The film’s depiction of the fraught mother-daughter relationship made her reflect on “not only how my mother treats me, but also how I treat my mother. And how we’re both equally culpable in behaving badly.”
These are heavy themes, but the film manages to stay true to them while striking a tone of warmth and lightness. “The stories that I’ve grown up seeing that centre Muslim women have always focused on trauma and the violence perpetrated against us,” Mirza says. She instead wanted to capture “the love, the joy, the comedy, the humour, the multiple feelings at one time”.
That involved telling a more compassionate story of intergenerational love and forgiveness. Though Mirza began the project as a way to understand her mother, and why she had grown more conservative over time, she realised: “I don’t know why she changed. But she had a whole life before I was in her life. And her mother had a whole life before any of us were alive. And that opened a huge door of compassion. I don’t know what they went through, and I will never know.” At screenings of the film, Kaur says, “people have been crying. It’s a real visceral thing, this thing about forgiveness. There’s so much generational trauma [in south Asian communities]. And we spend so much time, I spend so much time, blaming my mother, blaming my father. And then I look back and see that, wait, my parents are human and have been treated possibly even worse than they are treating me.”
The film was partly shot in Karachi, a feat only achieved, Kaur tells me, after Mirza fought hard with insurance companies (international films set in Karachi are often shot elsewhere). “It was a dream of mine to film there,” Mirza says. “I landed at five in the morning, went to the hotel,” Kaur says dreamily, “and the first thing I asked for was a cup of chai. The chai there is just so different. It’s got a different smell … drinking it on the patio with the mosquitoes being invasive and you’re swatting them away …”
Kaur, who was born to Sikh parents who immigrated to Canada from India, says she faced “a lot of resistance” about going to Pakistan. Family members would read news in India, and tell her “this isn’t going to be safe, people are going to treat you in a different way”. It made her realise this is “exactly why I needed to go”. “India is becoming a Hindu nationalistic country,” she says, “and Pakistani hate in the news is so high.” There was a conversation on whether “Pakistani people would be angry that an Indian woman is cast in this part”. For Kaur, the casting was a way to signal “no, we were one before. My grandparents were born in Pakistan. Fawzia’s grandparents were born in India. That we are one. It is a comment against the colonisers.” In the film, one character makes a reference to her infertility, saying she “was cut, just like how India was cut into India and Pakistan”. “How much have we suffered because of colonisation?” Mirza says. “There’s so many layers to it that our communities just don’t talk about. And now we are forced to live in these borders, with these identities of country, that were placed upon us.”
Kaur’s performance in the film clinched her the lead actor in a drama award at the Canadian Screen Awards this May. In her acceptance speech, she criticised those “telling us artists not to speak up in fear of losing jobs”, before calling for a “ceasefire now, free Palestine”. It went viral. “I was scared,” she tells me now. “At that time, very few people had spoken out. The fear of being cancelled, the fear of never working again, the fear of ostracisation was very high.” Her girlfriend had called her an hour before the show: “She was like, ‘This speech is making me angry. It’s not brave enough.’” And a nervous Kaur locked herself in the bathroom to work up a new version with Mirza and a mutual friend on Google docs. “When I was on the stage, I was shaking. But I had decided that it would be OK that I wouldn’t be able to work for two years. And that is absolutely worth it. And a small sacrifice in comparison to the death and lack of humanity in the world.”
Mirza uses the word “life-changing” to describe her experience making the film. How so? “It was life-changing in the fact that I got to tell a story that I’ve been wanting to tell about mother, daughter, and DNA that connects us to the past, the present, and the future in this way. And life-changing in how the audiences have been receiving this film,” she says. “To hear people say that they were laughing and crying at the same time watching this, that is literally everything I want.”
“I had a moment on set in Pakistan where I turned to my wife and I said, ‘Oh right, this is what I want to do for the rest of my life,’” Mirza says. It might be difficult to follow this debut, which spans so many different timelines, genres, and crossing continents, she jokes. For her next film, “I’m going to need a bigger budget!”
• The Queen of My Dreams is in UK cinemas on 13 September
