Saim Sadiq is at a cafe in London ahead of a screening of his debut film, Joyland. The film, which he co-wrote and directed, is a tender love story set in Lahore about an unemployed married man, Haider (Ali Junejo), who comes from a traditional family but takes a job as a backing dancer at an erotic dance theatre where he falls in love with a transgender woman called Biba (Alina Khan).
The film won the Jury prize at Cannes last May. It was the first Pakistani film to be screened at the festival; it has been praised by Riz Ahmed and Malala who both signed on as executive producers.
“It’s almost like everybody was home during the pandemic and they saw everything that white men had to make,” says Sadiq. “Then they’re like, ‘give us something new because whatever’s on the internet we have seen’.”
The novelty of a Pakistani film that features a trans woman might have been what ignited initial interest in Joyland, but for Sadiq that eye-catching love triangle is a means to discuss questions that have long obsessed him. “When you finish the film you realise it is not really about the trans character. I was using the love triangle premise to talk about what I really want to talk about – which is patriarchy.”
Sadiq, 31, grew up in Lahore, the only son of an army major father and home-maker mother. “I was a smart kid,” he says. “I was a good writer, a well-mannered kid and kind of funny. I was checking all the boxes, there was nothing wrong with me apart from one thing: growing up, I always knew that there is a right kind of masculinity, and I knew that because it was not me. The right kind of masculinity meant being interested in cricket, it meant going out and getting into fights and looking at girls in a certain way.”
Sadiq preferred looking at films. He began with Bollywood movies, but by the time he was 11 he was renting DVDs by John Cassavetes, Paul Thomas Anderson and Krzysztof Kieślowski. He was, he says, a “feminine child”, who as a small boy enjoyed trying on heels and wearing his female cousins’ clothes. Close to his mother’s family home was an exotic theatre where the local trans people would perform. Trans people were not uncommon in Pakistan – “they were once part of the royal courts, they used to be poets and artists” – and Sadiq was fascinated by how they challenged ideas of gender. When he would dress up in girl’s clothes his relatives would tell him to stop by threatening to hand him over to the trans people.
“I knew these people were transgressing,” he says today. “Their very existence reminded us that there are people in the world doing exactly what they want. They are saying fuck you to everyone.”
Sadiq revisited the world of exotic theatres in Joyland and some of the scenes were filmed in the Mehfil Theatre in Lahore. He started working on the film in 2016, and as part of his research he took a semester off from studying film at Columbia University in New York to return to Lahore where he spent four months attending shows at exotic theatres and talking to the dancers. The popularity of such venues in an otherwise very conservative country is a reminder that Pakistan is more complicated than outsiders might assume.
“Pakistan has become a bit schizophrenic, it’s a bit bipolar,” says Sadiq. “People pray and then they do a lot of things that they’re not supposed to do. There are these weird sort of outlets that people have found to be able to express themselves.”
One week before its domestic release in November 2022, Joyland was banned by the Pakistani government due to its “highly objectionable material”. The ban was reversed but the film remains banned in Punjab. “The minute the film was linked to religion – as in this film is going to destroy Islam – nobody is going to fact-check that,” says Sadiq. “Religion is the one topic you don’t discuss: you defend your religion, you don’t discuss it.”
Islam may be the reason cited for why Joyland was considered offensive but to Sadiq religion is just a convenient excuse. “It’s mostly people trying to avoid discomfort that stems from the idea that people have sex,” he says. “We spend our lives trying to hide our desires and the fact that other people have desires around us.”
One of the most charged scenes in Joyland is when Haider and Biba finally kiss. “If I am making a film about desire and shame the film itself can’t be so shameful,” says Sadiq. “I needed to show some desire.” The scene – not included in the Pakistani cut of the film – was meant to have been filmed on a street in Lahore but the actors got nervous, and so did Sadiq. “It was too risky so we shot it on a closed set.”
I wonder what might have happened if the scene had been shot on a Lahore street; it isn’t as if Pakistan has religious police such as in Iran. “Everybody’s the religious police. That’s why there isn’t a religious police. Anybody can stand up and become a religious police. You don’t need to appoint anybody and pay them when everybody’s willing to do it for free.”
Joyland was filmed in Pakistan but it was financed largely with American money, and having spent time in both countries Sadiq sees parallels between Christian and Muslim conservatives. “It is in their inability to engage with facts,” he says. “Why does a white straight man in Texas care so much about trans rights? Why he is obsessed with that when it’s not going to affect his life at all? It’s the same thing with why a 50-year-old lady in Punjab thinks my film is going to somehow hamper her life when she’s never going to have to encounter a trans person in her whole life.”
What was his answer to that question? “It’s just a fear of the unknown, and the fact that trans people just by their very existence are a threat to the patriarchal system, which works in binaries.” It was these restricting binaries that so frustrated Sadiq growing up in Lahore, but while Pakistan might be at times maddening he harbours no dream to leave. “I’ve lived most of my life in Pakistan,” he says. “Pakistani stories are my stories and every time I tell one it allows me to move forward. It’s like therapy.”
• Joyland is released on 24 February.
