Nawaz Sharif Mujra Scandal

its the season of the IPL and the season of T20. as i have argued previously, this event is a wonderful example of post-modernism, which, in the timeless words of Moe means "weird for the sake of being weird."

of course, for many T20 is an abhorrent, vile, abominable bastardisation of cricket. and many people have expressed such thoughts on twitter, missing the delectable irony of it all.

i started frequenting twitter recently after one of my regular reads migrated there. apart from the grotesque picture which adorns his page (seriously, you couldn't find a better messi picture?) it does provide an interesting insight into the evolving dynamics of this micro-blogging phenomenon.

as far as i can tell, its a bit like facebook for famous people, with the various castes defined by the level of fame.

so for example, there is a clutch of pakistani bloggers who communicate with themselves. and then there are journos, who talk to themselves, and the occasional politicians. who follow themselves, and bigger fish. and it goes on. my favourite sighting was ImranKhanPTI following Jemima on twitter. cue the laugh track.

but it was during this forage into twitterdom that i came across a certain account. the backstory for this was perhaps the greatest story to hit the news media since Nawaz Sharif remembered who butters his bread - the impending nuptials of Sania and Shoaib.

i found this page, which is Shoaib Malik's twitter page. its pretty ordinary, and quite what i expected - shoaib can be seen trying to contact yuvraj and warne, much in the vein of the upward social aspirations of all twitterati.

his recent tweets thank his fans for the goodwill surrounding his wedding, and previously he talks about trying to find a legal team for his PCB troubles. and before that he celebrates the win for Sialkot Stallions etc.

then, i found out, from his future wife, that his twitter page is fake.

WTF?

firstly, we have to believe this, since hopefully she would know better than anyone else. moreover, as someone mentioned, shoaib can never be expected to be this articulate.

having conceded that, we now must wonder - WTF?

try and understand this. there is someone out there who meticulously imagines the feelings shoaib malik goes through. more importantly, said person makes sure to write them within the time frame when they happen. so he makes sure that any important event in shoaib's life is updated asap.

what makes this even more intriguing is that there is no whiff of scandal, of aggrandizement, of mirch-masala here. all the tweets are of the typical mundanity that twitter tweets are comprised of. nothing here that makes you think, hang on, this is fake. and the internet, other than for porn, is meant for people to shout out FAKE whenever they get the chance. we are conditioned to spot fakes.

but... where is the fakeness, fake shoaib malik? what has compelled you to give up your life and your time and devote it to creating a shrine for someone not quite compelling (not until the Sania bombshell anyways) why have you not chosen your position to create mischief or abuse? how are you such a restrained fake personality, that you have actually managed to come across as more respectable than the real person you pretend to be?

perhaps the truth lies in believing in your own hype. in thinking that what you are doing is so right that you forget that your basis was baloney. perhaps when you start believing your own bullshit, you forget the lies you created and accept your own cocoon as the only bastion of reality.

and perhaps you can even make such a charade last forever.

until... until you begin believing your own batshit craziness so much that you decide to hold a grand rally where you promise to proclaim the greatness of your message. and your deluded followers decide to honor your much awaited rally with a rather slickly produced amateur video.

until the day your grand rally to end all rallies, the moment of truth, the launching of the invasion of the infidels, the realisation of existential islamic philosophy, the birth of the United States of Islam, the call of the army of Truth, the greatest moment of history in all histories arrives.

and, like, no one shows up.

Bombay Talkies

(This is my latest blog over at sastimasti. I have posted it here, although the videos have not been embedded, and i'm too tired having battled with wordpress to repeat the process here. so it would be best if you just went over to http://sastimasti.wordpress.com/2010/03/27/bombay-talkies/ and read it there. thanks :)

as i have mentioned previously, i am not a film buff per se. yes i like movies, but i don't have refined taste in them. so when in class our professors say something like "ah, the pathos employed by haneke through the mis-en-scene" i am sometimes compelled to say "yes, but what about the mis-en-scene in the sex scene in the titanic?

the few occasions that i do know about a film, i tend to argue quite passionately, to make up for the intellectual shame felt otherwise. one such argument was about whether the film Amelie was exploitative or not. we both ended up arguing that the director had exoticized paris. he felt i liked that because the subject was paris, i replied that i believe films need to exoticize, because they need to be fantasies, they need to be wondrous.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oubWmUJjZPE]

there is one particular filmmaker who, among many, does this to such a unique, signatory, marvelous manner. and one of his films has come under criticism for exoticsing a country quite used to it. here is wes anderson's take on an indian funeral. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2vYoCDKoK_w] (if the link is not working, try here)

the entire time, everything is in shades of white - flowers, clothes, smoke, rickshaws... now i love this film, and i love what some call it its exoticism of india. the politically correct part of me may concede that, but you have to watch a film. it mocks the western habit of coming to india to find 'themselves' and it presents india in a quirky, fantastical way that is true to those three americans' naive yet earnest take on india.

but a far better defense for this artistic liberty by the director was provided by an indian, who said that the fantastic mr. fox exoticises the forest, because animals don't talk, and they don't dress in clothes, and wes anderson was totally exploiting the forest and being all oriental about it. so i guess we can accept that exoticism is ok.

of course the liberal arts education section of our audience will ruffle their bob marley hair, and rub their che guevara beards, and log out of jstor and protest - no, it's dehumanizing, and like haven't you read Said? ok forget it then.

the beauty about wes anderson films is that even if you come across one randomly, you know its his. the look, the feel, the scale, the intricacy and the music. even though he never repeats, you hear a song and you think damn, this song is meant to be in a wes anderson film. i heard one such song in darjeeling limited, the movie posted above, and it was a completely desi song. and i thought 'wtf? how did the bastard get a song made that's totally desi and yet perfect for him?' [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bkcVyNw-USA]

(if this link is not working, try here)

after some investigations, i discovered that it was from a film whose credit sequence was wes anderson's favorite sequence, evuh! without further ado, [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wMuYl_-ig8&feature=related]

now people will tell you that this film, bombay talkies by ismail merchant, is a 'realistic' movie, completely different from normal hindi movies - it even has kissing scenes! but in fact, this film retains the elements of melodrama, song and dance, bizarre sequences, action comedy romance etc in equal measures. the only thing done differently here is that while the elements of the content remain same, the form with which they are shown is either improved, satirized or both. it is a bollywood film made in a different cinematic language perhaps, but it tells the same story. IMP: this review contains spoilers. there is a link to a site where you can stream the film for free near the end of this post. so if you haven't seen it yet it might be a good idea to do so before you read on. but even if you don't it doesn't give too much away and you can still enjoy it whenever you do see.

but don't be fooled into thinking that the language is that of western cinema. in 1970, the new york times had reviewed this film, the review article adorned with the sarcastic by-line: 'Famous, Rich ... Nice Looking' the NYT enjoyed the film's whimsical scenes, but cringed at its drama. The reviewer wrote

"Bombay Talkie," however, persists in switching back and forth between this quite cheerful satire and the quite seriously intended, awkwardly defined emotional conflicts involving the novelist, the actor, the actor's unhappy wife and his best friend. I assume that this conflict between comedy and melodrama is meant to be its own metaphor, for contemporary India, for Indian movies, even for love. Though tactful, the metaphor is mixed.

Almost 40 years later, a renowned indian critic, filmi geek panned the movie as well. the complaint was its attitude, which

seemed to treat India (and Indian films) with a certain condescension that I found both offensive and inappropriate.

Filmi Geek was upset that the foreign audiences would look at the film's depiction of indian spirituality with mirth, with pity, writing that the female lead's Lucia's unease towards the religious scene is displayed not as "Look at Lucia, too inflexible to adapt to a different culture," but "look at this adorable weird little Indian spirituality, too primitive for a civilized person like Lucia."

those fears were confirmed before they were written, as the NYT felt the scene involving Lucia with the spiritual guru displayed Lucia becoming "restless, however, with the swami's little lectures about his social successes in Los Angeles, and her idea of recreation is something more than being allowed to fetch the swami's lost Ping-Pong balls"

of course, what both reviews betray are their writers political, intellectual and aesthetic bends. moreover, the tragedy is that such a gorgeous film is dissected only at the level of story and characters.

but even there, the two have missed out on something vital. if this film plays any politics, it is to denounce all strands of it. every character, every ideology is savaged in this film with equal determination. both Lucia and the swami she goes to are mocked, one for her naive assumption that somehow india would provide them some ready made spiritual answers, the other for having commercialized spiritual beliefs for misfit tourists like Lucia. and as for Filmi Geek's concerns about the attitude, here is what i have to argue - yes they are poking fun, but its not the oriental attitude of a foreigner finding the natives crude and pitiful but rather the insiders who are intimate with their own arts and culture, poking fun at what they know well. to prove my point, have a look at this

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JqCjoFjIC34]

more importantly, the film retains the element of the bollywood film. there are several scenes where music being played within the scene, such as on a radio, is used to score the characters dancing and driving the story forward. stylistically, its worlds apart from the pantomime of the traditional musical, but it is serving the same purpose. and when the time does arrive for the blow-out bollywood song-and-dance, the number that comes on screen is far ahead of anything else that has ever been conceived. look at it yourself. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzC3GQn_TC0]

the film has some absolutely brilliantly shot scenes - in particular is a staircase shot that is repeated twice in the film. once its comic, the other time its tragic and both are done in such a magnificent way. what triumphs in each of these scenes, as well as the rest of the film, is the sound design. desi films rarely have such an accomplished use of sound. perhaps one of the best examples is when Lucia meets Vikram, the hero, and both of them hit it off. their eager conversation is heard as the camera shows us the face of Vikram's wife - its a superb scene, and it works because of the use of sound. another great part is the last shot, where the camera is too far to make out the actions of the servant, yet the sound of his tray shaking with his shivers conveys to us all that we need to know.

but from a pakistani perspective, the height of enjoyment is a chance to watch zia moheyuddin on screen. probably one of the most famous names in pakistan, few people under 30 have actually seen him do the thing he is famed for - acting. the word in the theater circle is that moheyuddin is an extremely demanding task-master - in french, he is an a**hole. well in this film, he is the ultimate bitch. i have rarely seen such a snide, bitter, witty character as Moheyuddin here. his looks and gait go form resentful brooding to cynical whimsy. and his obvious contrast with the pin-up looks of shashi kapoor accentuates his character even further.

*since i wrote this, my wife and i have had an almighty debate over Zia Moheyuddin's character in this film. for her, his obsessiveness and passion represents the most human characteristics of love. i argued that his love was 'fake' as his final act of vengeance was based on vikram's taunts, suggesting that his envy of vikram was greater than his love for Lucia. in response, she argued that it is illogical to separate the two feelings, or to ascribe ideals of truth and fake to love. i think we can safely say that the film's characters are great, and its tragedy is of a greek or shakespearian level. which means that people like the NYT columnist can find that to be melodramatic, but anyone well versed in the arts of the desi might not.*

you can watch the darjeeling limited online, and you can do the same for bombay talkies as well.

but before we leave, here is something i call conspiracy critiques. despite my disavowal for politics, i am pakistani and i can't run away from how i think. take a look at the following scenes (especially part two), and then ask yourself if this is not a metaphor for both india and pakistan's political history with western alliances, and how the fallout from those have affected pakistan's behaviour. remember also, that the jasmine is our national flower.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DpP5fOLfcTE&feature=channel]

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2hHPBg6XEzU]

Pakistani Sex Scene

nothing works better on the internet than a title with sex in it. i have experimented several times with this idea of using popular words in blog posts, and they always work like a charm.

this time though, it's not exactly a gimmick. this short film explicitly attempts to talk about sex on the pakistani screen. but the conversation itself is a strange one. so before anything else, have a look at the video itself.


Pakistani Sex Scene from karachikhatmal on Vimeo.
This is the third film of my Masters degree. this time around the rules were that the entire film had to be shot in one, continuous take - with no edits or cuts in between.

here is a link to my reflections on the film

http://sastimasti.wordpress.com/2010/03/17/pakistani-sex-scene/

thus, everyone is familiar with the ubiquitous cinematic convention of the hero and heroine in a tight embrace, their lips edging towards one another, their breathing hot and heavy - and just when the hero lunges forward, the heroine turns away her face.

foiled again!

but in an increasingly sexualized world, those cultural conventions are being stretched in our part of the world for some time now and the logic of suggesting without showing has been radically transformed. one example being the song referenced in the film - Pyar Di Ganderi. i mean, come on!

this song wraps itself around the pillars of showing & suggesting, and pole dances on them. and the visual interpretation of this Naseebo Lal song by Khusbo really leaves you wondering if there is anything left to suggest.



but if we start to blame the song here, then we are really missing the point. its not about the song, or the dancer - it's about the society. too often art is blamed for creating immorality within society. what people fail to appreciate that art's purpose is to act as a mirror, as well as a guide. when we see ourselves in the mirror held up by art, we are able to break and change what we are. and then, we are able to form new thoughts and ideas, guided by the spirit of art.

whew... that got a bit heavy there.

my point was that the song and these attitudes of suggestiveness reflect our own society. the crucial thing here is the relationship between shame and lust -  each seems to inform the other. this is because we get ashamed of something when our morals condemn it, but our desires don't. but if we keep reacting to shame by suppressing our desires, our lust continues to grow. and so we try and keep that in check through shame... and the cycle continues.

this was where my original idea finally arrived at. i wanted to show the irony of how an average pakistani male can be so sexualized and yet feel ashamed of that sexual lust. thus one of the earliest drafts of a script had envisioned the scene where the man would rush into the shower straight after the act.

i was unsure of where else to go from there though. i wanted to say something about the woman, but couldn't find any thing suitably authentic without being melodramatic. so i turned to the woman in my life - my wife. she was the one who came up with the aftermath of that scene, specifically because she realised that the casualty from this conflict between shame and lust is intimacy.

it made a lovely resonance with my own ideas. i have always felt that taking an interest in pakistani politics is futile. because everything in pakistan is extremely politicized, from choice of hospital to etiquette of urdu grammar, but the politics themselves follow a depressingly familiar, monotonous pattern. and just like we have politics everywhere other than in politics itself, we seem to have sex everywhere, other than in sex itself.

thus the film's body took shape.

it begins with a man who attacks his food with relish and passion, which he eats alone before entering the house. at home, he rejects the meal his wife had brought for the two of them to share. while she is away, he turns to watch an overtly sexual song, but switches to the news (which is always about politics :) ) when she comes back. he then leads her to the bedroom, and the camera doesn't show what happens. but he soon rushes out, covered in shame rather than lust, and washes it off in the shower. the woman is alone, bereft of all passion, or even motivation to clear up the room. she tries to eat, perhaps to partake in that pleasure her husband had alone, but she can't bring herself to do it.

but then came the actual shoot. and let me tell you, doing a single-take is probably the hardest thing to do. it works well in  a live situation, but in a narrative it really wears down on your flow. and i think this is where the film's greatest challenge arose - it was not conceived as a single shot. it was conceived as a story that was then tacked onto a single shot. and so the story's pace and pivots did not account for the demands made by the single shot. this issue was further compounded by the fact that i am someone whose strength as a filmmaker lies within the edit. to be stripped of all editing abilities was something i was distinctly uncomfortable with, and so i didn't take to the idea of a single-take at all.

i made that even more challenging with my decision to have both actors only visible from the waist down. it was meant to further accentuate the ubiquity of this situation (so that it was a man and a woman, rather than this person and that person) as well as play up the idea of how everything about sex itself is so shrouded. and to make matters worse, i did away with all dialogue - there are only two grunts and one sigh which make up the entire film's dialogue. keeping all of that in mind, the actors did a wonderful job. their only tools were their lower bodies and yet they managed to convey their roles admirably. it could've been better though had i rehearsed with them, but then that is how student projects, and my own laziness, goes.

the day before i began my edit, i came across a bizarre and wonderful thing. in my audio-vision class, our professor made us watch an entire film, which was highly unusual since we always watch clips instead. it was 87 minutes of overwhelming cinema - its disturbing how difficult it is to view despite its stellar beauty. the film was called  Koyaanisqatsi. Check out this stunning single take shot from the film - i can't believe this is real.



what influenced me with regards to this film was its soundtrack. check out the trailer below, and listen to the initial chanting, or just go up to 1:48 in the above clip.



i was convinced - i needed to score my film. but i wanted it to be haunting, and preferably bereft of lyrics because they could get too distracting, and impose their own meaning on the film. my wife suggested i check out rohail hyatt's work, and that was where i chose the song, Jaag Musafir.

when i had started the audio editing, i realised that the youtube page for the song also had an explanation for the lyrics and the song's message, which i later put on at the end of the film.

looking back at the choice of the song i have mixed emotions. on one hand i feel that it didn't help with regard to its intended purpose - which was to give life to the parts of the film where the one-shot parameters had left it dragging.

but then again, i was astounded by the happy coincidence that the song i had chosen had taken on the irony and cynicism of my views, and injected it with hope for salvation, for this wretched cycle to be broken. while my other two films were made with a sort of flippancy towards "messages" and "big ideas" this one was taking these things on. and i think that the song really challenged the sincerity of the film.

at the end, i feel that the critique of the film, and its ideas, were a lot more powerful than the actual film itself. still, i am happy with it, especially because of the visual style i managed to achieve with the editing. i didn't want to look like yet another student film, and while the camera lets that down, the lack of annoying sound jumps and the boldness of the scene's colors and boundaries take it beyond completely amateur stuff.

please let me know what you think of the film.

Naked Pictures of Reema

some important news.

i have a new blog.

i am not sure where this leaves this current one, but in order to facilitate all seven of my readers, i will be cross-posting here as well. and perhaps once in a while i would put up something original here as well.

here is the first post.


But first, a word about copy-paste material.

it feels very weird leaving a blog - it's like moving out of your childhood neighborhood.

it also feels very self-obsessed to write about my own blog, but then again self-obsession and blogs go hand in hand. it was precisely because of that recognition that i chose never to write about myself (or too much about myself) on copy-paste material. instead, what that blog (thankfully) provided for me was a chance to develop an alter-ego.

alter-egos are not necessarily healthy things, but i think as an artist, it is important to cultivate one, because i guess the culmination of the artistic process is the merging between your self, and your created self. the union between the creator and the created. (zing! first pretentious reference to stuff i admire without having the courage to experience, or challenge)

and it was important for me to have an alter-ego i liked.

i started blogging the day they released a picture of BB's assassin. well, to be honest, that was the day i was truly intrigued by blogs. because the picture came from a journalist who had apparently found it on a blog. so i started discovering, and reading blogs - pakistani blogs.

what does this have to do with an alter-ego? its because i was a journalist at that point. a journalist comes on screen to tell you about something, why and how it happened, and then leaves you with either a direct or indirect idea of what he thinks should be done about it. fuck all the bullshit which claims journalism is about objectivity. its not that subjective journalists are lazy or sacrilegious - a journalist CAN NOT be anything but a preacher. you do a story on child labor, and you walk away with telling people about how its terrible and something should be done about it. or you do it on cancer victims, and walk away telling people how something should be done about it.

and at that point, the journalist lies back, content that he has done his service for humanity. and then at the next 'mimi' fun-bash, he/she goes on and on about how life should be lived and pakistan should be straightened out, the entire diatribe fed by the smug-self-congratulatory idea that the journalist knows all this because he/she is 'out there', 'making a difference.' the journalist is the alter-ego created by the person who works at that job. and almost all of these alter-egos, my own included, are shocking hypocrisies when compared to the person who dons them.

my favorite example of this was when the young boy who served tea to all the journos at our channel was banned from entering the main studio. the reason being that we were running a campaign against child labor, and having a child laborer pop up in the studio (visible through the glass doors behind the anchor) was just bad taste.

karachikhatmal allowed me to have an alter-ego i actually liked. it let me say things i believed in, and it allowed me to be critical, affording just enough distance for the 'self-criticism' to not feel too stinging. and for the two plus years i wrote there, it allowed me to develop my own style in terms of narration, my own set of ideas, and my own small group of people who thought it was great.

every time i wrote a post, i would obsessively check my e-mail, hoping for a new comment to show up. they would arrive very slowly, very rarely, and would often be complaints about how long the post was. yet perversely, i could later entertain fantasies about how i was so cutting-edge that the mainstream wasn't yet able to accept me. kind of like being the band radiohead was into.

but most of all i was determined for it to be about pakistan, but NOT about pakistani politics.

too much everything within pakistani society is about politics. our most popular songs, our most engaging comedy, our sport(s), our culture, our religion.

which would have been fine, until you realise that the reason everything is so politicized is because pakistani politics itself is so detached, so beyond change that it has become some sort of dogma which dictates everything else. everything about pakistani politics is nauseatingly repetitive and un-surprising. so copy-paste material steered clear of discussing politics for their own sake.

it was harder to write about pakistan without mentioning politics though. the only language i could write and express intelligently in is english. i was educated at the best schools. (not at KGS though - thank the Lord) i lived in an area owned by the army. and as such, i was part of a class which either feels it knows what is good for the rest of the unwashed masses, or wishes that it could escape the unwashed masses. having experienced the former at LUMS, and having lost interest in the latter post-college, i was a bit unsure. but as karachikhatmal i knew what to do. i wanted to bring to light the pakistan that we experienced and existed in, but were too ashamed, confused, or in denial to articulate.

i could have said that i wanted to 'create' a vision of pakistan i agreed with, but that would be false. i tried to write what i felt was true.

to this day, more people from the US read copy-paste material than any other place. and the blog on burgers is the most widely read of all. it is nowhere near my best, but i think it says something very original.

No, you are not middle class. You are not upper-middle class. You are not middle-upper-middle-class.

You are a burger. I am a burger.

And we need to shut the fuck up and realize this fact.

the reason this struck a chord is because burgers are either those who hate pakistan because they don't accept it, and don't feel accepted there. or burgers are people who deep down know they are burgers, but have been educated and been made aware enough to hate that label, and resist ever being called that. by saying that burgers are pakistani too, i was able to move beyond the inane polemics of pakistani conversation and move towards something substantial. too many people spend time on the blogosphere arguing about the NRO or the Army or whatever to confirm that they are smart, and that they care about their country. but arguing about such bullshit is a waste of time, and brain cells.

what we need is to start talking about ourselves, our societies, our families and friends, our cars and our languages, our tastes in music and shoes, our preferences of internet browsers. and by we, i mean pakistanis. we agonize so much about matters beyond our control because it allows us to feel like we are doing something, while at the same time abdicating actual responsibility. it allows us to feel like we care, even as we tell the child labor servant in our house to fetch us a glass of water. (i do that all the time) and it turns us all into those journalists i was talking about - people who delude themselves into thinking that they are making a difference, when all they are doing is blowing hot air.

of course, i then moved to london for my masters degree. once i was physically separated from pakistan, i found it hard to write about it. what made it worse was as my alter-ego, i expected a very high quality of blogs from myself. (despite two-plus years of going to blogs nearly every day, i only wrote about 30 posts. and their frequency kept decreasing.) the last post i wrote made me realise that not only my style had developed and changed, but i was now more interested in different things.

and so, finally, we come here.

to sasti-masti.

i never saw pakistani movies while growing up. the only time i ever saw any was to enhance the effects of inebriation due to their inherent bizarreness and outlandishness.



i never even liked bollywood, which most pakistanis prefer over the local produce. it wasn't anything against india, i just liked 'american movies' a lot more, i didn't like songs in the middle of movies, and i found it all very tedious and unbelievable. but then again, movies and cinema as a whole was not exactly a passion for me, like the way cricket is.

so when i joined film school, i was at a loss because i had never seen enough good hollywood movies, let alone the french new wave or the italian neo-realists any half serious film student would obsess about. for example, i had seen more of scorsese with dicaprio than scorcese with deniro. so i had a choice - i could start educating myself about all these film-student must haves, or i could start venturing into completely unknown territory - lollywood.

i have ostensibly chosen the latter. i say that because as yet, i still watch about 20 movies from the rest of the world compared to every 1 i see from pakistan. its not the easiest thing in the world to suddenly get into. but it does allow me to do something i had advocated at copy-paste material - to stop being ashamed and embarrassed of pakistan, and to embrace it instead. and just because doing that is hard doesn't make you more or less of a pakistani.

and so it begins.

i promise (to myself) to write here as often as i can, with a minimum of a post-a-week. of course this means a loss in quality, but i hope that the content would redeem that issue. not everything would be about lollywood, but that would explain itself as the process continues.

it has taken me a month to write this first post. i had a million different ideas about how to start, but finally, i have started. and i realise that despite all the grandeur, these words would probably only be read by me. but that's something karachikhatmal (and myself?) would have to learn to accept.

one last thing.

one day, people in my class were all talking about their own countries. its a small class, but with people from france, india, persia etc everyone could talk about globally acclaimed stuff from back home. i was very proud to show them this. i hope that you too can learn to love it.

The Room

I had made a big deal of it when i had posted my first student film. I am going to be a lot more basic with this one.

The project for this film stipulated a 6-8 minute piece, shot entirely in one location with the location playing a central role in the film.

I personally think it's a better effort than my first one, and moreover this time around i did everything myself. which felt quite good. for those of you interested, there is no post-production work in here. no special effects either, unless you count animation as an effect. which no one does.

The Room from ahmernaqvi on Vimeo.

The Room was made as part of my MA in Independent Film Degree. This particular film was part of a project which decreed that the entire film had to be shot within a certain location, and the location was meant to be a key character within the whole film. Everything, from the story to the camera and the editing was done by myself, using a rig and a tripod.

let me know what you think. please, if there is anyone still reading here, don't be as silent as last time.

While i'm here, some fun facts. during the stop motion, i made some major blunders like leaving in glasses or my hands in some shots, which led to some really shoddy photoshopping i am sure the eagle eyed among you can spot. the scissors used in the final sequence also kept hitting the lens, so that some of the shots have stab marks over them. but my favourite bit was that when i was shooting the books for the stop motion, one book kept falling down and was completely unreliable. yes, it was the afridi book. gotta love it :)