Jaydeep Sarkar

Thank you . I almost lost faith in the audience after it failed . I think it’s my most accomplished work.Shantanu and Swananand have hit it out of the park with every song . Kyon naye naye se dard ki firaq mein , talash mein UDAAS hai Dil .Tell me a better line in a Hindi film.

Thank you .

5. 🎬Shaurya (2008) A military lawyer defends an officer accused of killing his commanding officer, revealing deeper issues of honor, patriotism, and justice within the armed forces.

Besides the fact there is a French Beach in Karachi, what I learnt from Saim Sadiq’s film Joyland (2022) is that an unborn child’s sex determination is legal in Pakistan. Unlike in India. As you can tell in the family drama, where the grand old patriarch is craving a male grandchild from his two sons. The ultrasound delivers a false-positive report for a boy once. The result could be correct, the second time on. Joyland is easily the most feted Pakistani film in the art-house scene—the first to win an award at Cannes. It officially dropped online, recently, on Mubi. I watched it with immense interest, finally—for how it is aesthetically delightful, checking all the boxes: authentic performances, gentle camerawork, grey characters, and a world so geographically close to Indians, of course, and yet so politically far. At its margins is the story of a fling between a gay man and a transgender dancer. That the film was initially banned in Pakistan, before a limited release, tells me the homosexuality laws, first put in place by the British, continue to prevail. It would be the same Section 377 of the Indian Penal Code since 1860. A society that criminalises love, of any kind, actively legalises hate. To be fair, the Indian Supreme Court struck down 377, eventually, only on September 6, 2018! One of Joyland’s lead actors is a transgender person, Alina Khan, playing the transgender role, Biba. Which can’t be said for transgender roles in Indian cinema over decades. A reason the transgender activist Gauri Sawant said she wished former Miss Universe Sushmita Sen to play her in the biopic Taali (2023, Jio Cinema)—she had already led such a dark life, full of insurmountable challenges. She wanted someone beautiful to depict her on screen, for starters. Sen was Sawant’s personal choice. Seeking beauty, whether in art or otherwise, is a birthright—well-known realities are secondary. Joyland, named after an amusement park in Lahore, is altogether a joyless film. As are most films/series/docs with LGBTQ+ characters, on occasion, tending towards atrocity porn. Consider the sheer ugliness in an equally recent film, Haddi (2023), with Nawazuddin Siddiqui as a transgender don. Why is the recent, six-part, LGBTQ documentary series, Rainbow Rishta (2023), on Amazon Prime Video, produced by Vice Studios, following six stories, across economic classes and geographies so different? Column link in 1st comment👇🏽 ‘The rain-bow and Cupid’s arrow!’