Interview by
Benjamin Poole
Spanning two different generations and times,
The Queen of My Dreams follows Azra (Amrit Kaur) as she
travels to Karachi after her father's death to reconnect with her estranged
mother Mariam (Nimra Bucha). Azra must come to terms with mourning
her idealised late father while trying to understand her equally complex
mother through their joint obsession with Bollywood.
We spoke with writer/director Fawzia Mirza about her cross-cultural
comic drama.
Hello Fawzia! Congratulations on The Queen of My Dreams! I
really enjoyed it and
said as much in my review, but would you please introduce the film to our readers?
Azra is at odds with her mother and when a tragedy occurs, she travels to
Pakistan, which launches us into two other time periods that were
impactful in both her and her mother's lives. It takes place in three time
periods and two countries – Canada and Pakistan. It's a dramedy. It's a
love story. It's a love letter to mothers.
Azra, the main character of The Queen of My Dreams, is an
aficionado of Bollywood cinema, and the film in turn respects the recognisable
style and characteristics of Bollywood. Aside from it being a plot
feature, I was hoping that you could elaborate on
The Queen of My Dreams' relationship with this type of cinema; how it influenced the storytelling and the look of the film?
I'm influenced by the ideas of love and romance from Bollywood – the
music, the grandness, the fantasy, the elaborate meet-cute, the inevitable
love-at-first-sight. I mean, Bollywood is inherently queer in its
depictions of gender, music, costume, fluidity, aka, you can be more than
one thing at any given time (it's a comedy, a musical, a drama, a romance,
a horror, a tragedy). Joyful, comedic storytelling are revolutionary and
powerful cinematic forms.
In The Queen of My Dreams, Amrit Kaur plays a dual role of
mother and daughter. It is a terrific performance in both roles, with the
two characters sharing similarities but also being highly distinct
(Don't just take my word for it: in pre-interview research I was delighted
to discover that Amrit recently won the Canadian Screen Award for
Best Lead Performance in a Drama Film – go Amrit!) Would you please talk
a little about the process of working with Amrit in realising
this diptych. For example, did your direction differ in any way when
she was playing Azra or Mariam, and how did Amrit prepare for each
"role"?
I cast Azra/Young Mariam trusting that mother and daughter would feel
similar because of the same actor, but also because mothers and daughters
ARE similar. I also didn't think they needed to look alike, because if
their chemistry and connection to the emotional truth of the characters
came through, that would be everything we needed. I cast Amrit because I
knew she could do it. She's skilled, she's talented, she's also queer and
to me, she seemed like she was in a place where she shared some of Azra's
journey. Amrit practiced Urdu with a dialect coach, she took Bharatanatyam
dance classes to get in the body of the Mariam character, she worked with
her personal coach on the script, and I think she channelled me for Azra!
We didn't have much time for rehearsal -- #indiefilmlife – but that's why
casting the right people in Amrit, Hamza, Nimra and Ayana and Ghul-E-Rana,
was so key.
The film's opening establishes Azra as being in a loving
relationship with another woman, anchoring the film as a potentially queer narrative. As The Queen of My Dreams continues, conflict will
be created by the juxtaposition of Mariam's conservatism and
Azra's sexuality (along with the lamentable reality of limited gay rights
in Pakistan, Mariam's home country). Within the film, I saw the
florid colour, brazen romance and singing/dancing hyperbole of Bollywood as
a hopeful and specifically gay escapism for the socially and
culturally repressed Mariam (in the same way, say, as the excesses of horror has
an invested LGBTQ+ audience, along with subsequent subjective interpretation). Is this a viable reading? What especial
meanings could Bollywood cinema have for queer audiences?
We need and deserve joy! Like, why are the most profitable and
high-profile films about queer and trans people all about the violence
perpetrated against us? (There's enough violence in the world like what
we’re seeing being perpetrated everyday against the people of Gaza!) Okay,
and violence may be part of our struggle, but we are not defined by that
violence. And our realities can be and are in fact Bollywood movies.
The Queen of My Dreams is based upon your solo stage show, which
has now become a film nominated for several trophies at the
Canadian Screen Awards. How was the journey from page to stage to screen
for this deeply personal project? Was cinema an initial goal for
The Queen of My Dreams or did the potential occur later, and if so,
how?
It's been a circuitous journey to get here, from lawyer to actor to
actor-writer to writer-director.
I made my first short film The Queen of My Dreams in 2012. I
was struggling with reconciling my identities – I was an actor at the time
so I'd shot footage that I was going to turn into a multi-media
performance art piece. But a filmmaker friend of mine, Ryan Logan, said he
thought my footage could be a movie. And he helped me turn my struggle
into a 3-min short. Making that saved my life. Sharing it gave me a
community where my voice mattered. The big dream at the time was to write
and perform a one person show, so with the help of Catharsis Productions
out of Chicago, I adapted the short into just that. I got to perform the
play all over, including three cities in Pakistan. I even made a
documentary about that complicated journey called
The Streets Are Ours that you can watch online. I was
writing more, making shorts, made a feature Signature Move, and so by 2017, I felt like I could potentially adapt this one person
show into a screenplay. It took me a while to find the right
configuration, of people, of story, of the world, of myself, but we got
there.
If you were to programme The Queen of My Dreams with two other films on a triple bill, what would they be and why?
It depends. Is it intended to be films that share DNA? Or films that work
together but are completely different? How about this:
The Farewell
and Hot Fuzz.
I can imagine viewers watching The Queen of my Dreams and
being inspired to discover yet more of the sort of films Azra idolises.
I wonder if you could give the uninitiated a few pointers of where
to begin with Bollywood, please?
The film within my film is Aradhana starring Sharmila Tagore
and Rajesh Khanna. I love stuff from all over the timeline:
Taj Mahal, Pakeeza, Yeh Vadha Raha, Hero, Disco Dancer, Dil Wale
Dulhania Le Jayenge (Ddlj), Sholay, Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham, Umrao
Jaan, Chandni, Devdas….
The Queen of My Dreams is in UK
cinemas from September 13th.