Inside “Slackistan”

Hammad Khan was once a man with a cinematic vision for Pakistan. His self-assigned mission saw him returning to his homeland every year to make a film. The idea was that after five years of traveling between London, where he now lives, and Pakistan, he would have done his bit to help put the country on the world cinema map. Yet nearly a year after the world premiere of Slackistan, his independent debut feature, he is no longer so ready to seal the deal. Made in Pakistan productions have, for the time being, lost their allure.

Premiering at London’s Raindance Film Festival last October, Slackistan went on to play international film festivals in Cannes, New York and Abu Dhabi to rave reviews. It successfully beat off competition from more than 2,000 entries – 200 of which came from South Asia alone – to secure a place at the latter. Festival head Peter Scarlett introduced it as “one of the most surprising and unexpected new films we’ve seen all year.”

This makes it all the more surprising, then, that the 35-year-old Khan has chosen to swap Pakistan for Britain as the backdrop of his next few ventures. Explaining the move, he told me, “I’ve found a complete lack of support for independent filmmakers and film in Pakistan, from private investors to corporations to film companies to the government.” The situation is not helped, he stresses, by a punitive 65-percent-entertainment tax that makes independent filmmaking in the country nearly impossible.

Slackistan’s road to infamy began last year with its unofficial trailer, running under the tagline “Think you know Pakistan. Think again.” Khan, who spent some of his schooldays in Peshawar and Islamabad, had primarily cobbled together footage to show friends and industry people his work in progress. Yet the message was misread.  Many took the scenes featuring the small cast of hip, young things dressed in trendy Western clothes, discussing relationships, and boozing it up as Khan’s attempt to convince the West that this was wholly representative of today’s Pakistan. That, he says, was never his intention. In fact, he was more interested in showing something different to Pakistani audiences than providing an eye-opener to the West. “It was important that we, in Pakistan, could see these people,” he said. As for the West, he added simply, “For those who think Pakistan is Taliban and burqas, that’s the end of the story. For them, they need to think again.”

Pakistan’s Central Board of Film Censors (CBFC) hasn’t bought either premise. On Jan. 21, it suspended Slackistan‘s general release unless Khan conceded to a total of 65 cuts. Aside from two scenes featuring alcohol, a gag was put on uncouth language, English and Urdu both. And even then the film would still have been accorded a certificate rating of 18, in contrast to the American and Indian films being regularly passed without adult ratings.

The CBFC also wanted removed all mention of Osama bin Laden and the Taliban, even though there is not one single reference to the late al-Qaeda chief. It is not clear whether the Taliban objection refered to just dialogue or to scenes showing Pakistani news channel footage. Only in two instances do the characters mention the militant group: the first, when one cheerily shows off video cell phone images of the Taliban’s throat-slitting talents. And the second, when two characters joke about what sort of party-scene-dress-code the Taliban might go for when they want to let their turbans down.

Khan’s refusal to play ball means that his film remains effectively banned from Pakistani cinemas, thereby drastically narrowing its reach. Yet he remains unrelenting. “I felt compelled to take a principled stand on the issue of free liberal expression and my right to make and show my film to its audience as it was intended.” This was especially true, he says, in the wake of the murder of Punjab’s flamboyant and outspoken governor Salmaan Taseer, and what he sees as acquiescence by the authorities to extremist aggression.

The ensuing publicity likely didn’t hurt. That a Pakistani film had been banned over Taliban references at a time when Taseer had just been assassinated for supporting a repeal of the country’s blasphemy laws set much of the Western media ablaze.

Yet once the hype died down, many Western film critics felt somewhat cheated over the absence of a bullet-and-bomb narrative. “The problem,” according to Khan, “is that Pakistan in any sort of media context in the West is still seen through their prism, so it becomes a very narrow conversation.” Nevertheless, Khan, who qualified as a lawyer before landing a film examiner’s position at the British Board of Film Classification, recalls being stunned when Slackistan, which he sums up as “a youth movie at best,” was torn apart by British academics on The Review Show, the BBC’s weekly arts program. “They were basically saying, ‘how dare he give us a film from Pakistan and not give us context about why we’re in Afghanistan … we want answers and we’re not getting them. We’re getting Americanized youth.'”

This apparent disconnect between the Pakistani authorities viewing even a single Taliban reference as a red line and Western observers feeling shortchanged over the militants’ cameo-backdrop-appearances has left audiences in Pakistan perplexed as to what Slackistan stands for, if anything.

Limited private screenings of the original cut have been held in Islamabad, Lahore and Karachi. While some embraced the film as a reflection of their own lives, others were bewildered by the lack of a plot-driven narrative. A Lahore-based entertainment company, Origami, held screenings over two days. CEO Mehreen Rana notes that this coincided with the cinema release of the box-office smash, Bol (Speak), Shoaib Mansoor’s second feature, which tackles issues such as the so-called “third sex” —  those born with both male and female reproductive organs — and male rape. Rana says her company decided to show Slackistan because, it’s a Pakistani film, but also because it doesn’t contain anything objectionable. “If Bol could play to cinema houses, why not Slackistan?” Ironically, she recalls, some people walked out when they realized there was no controversial content. This is no surprise to Shahana Khan Khalil, who plays Zara. “Indie films have their own flavor and it’s the filmmaker’s prerogative to tell the story as he sees fit.” She also points out that Slackistan was shot documentary-style, something that would not necessarily be familiar to everyone. In fact, Hammad Khan was the guy left holding the camera, after his cameraman bailed on him the day before shooting began. “People would have understood the genre better had they seen any slacker movies,” Shahana says.

For that is what Slackistan is. Set in Islamabad – the city that always sleeps – it spotlights a group of five friends as they as they drift, a year on from university, through a slow-motion-whirlwind of driving around on a never-ending road to nowhere, chilling out and partying. This sense of aimlessness offers a window into one of Pakistan’s more perplexing paradoxes: In a country afflicted by widespread poverty, a privileged background can lead to a paralyzing inertia.

That the posse in the film graduated in 2008, just as democracy made a bloody and dramatic return to the country, may have led to expectations that the film would, at the very least, proffer some sort of verdict on Pakistan’s new political climate. This is especially true given Khan’s own background — his father, a Major in the Pakistan Army, resigned from his post to protest Gen. Zia ul-Haq’s 1977 military coup. The family sought political asylum in Britain a year later when Khan was just three. But Slackistan was never meant to be a political film. “It is,” says Khan, “a bittersweet slice of life.”

But he acknowledges that such expectations are, in the end, inevitable. As he sees it, the decay of society — fueled by an overwhelming lack of justice, opportunity and hope — has severely impacted the collective Pakistani psyche. Throw into the mix an increasing anti-Americanism and fervent religiosity and Khan concludes there is little space for cultural appreciation. “So someone trying to make a film, write a book or take to the stage will not face support but unreasonable scrutiny…art for art’s sake is not something people feel they can afford to appreciate right now.”

People seek instead instant catharsis, which Slackistan does not readily offer. Images of the two extremes of Pakistan’s rigid class divide confront the audience in the very opening scenes, as protagonist Hasan explains how the city is demarcated so that these two worlds coexist without ever colliding.

And, for the most part, this holds true for the slackers, too. Hasan sees a child sitting on the edge of the family lawn, reading a textbook, and is surprised to learn he is the youngest son of a domestic worker. A later discovery that the boy has been taken out of school to contribute to the family’s struggling income contrasts sharply with his own situation. Hasan has voluntarily giving up his filmmaking dreams while the child of an impoverished family has the dream of nothing more than an education stolen from him. But even then these two worlds don’t collide. The nearest they come is when Hasan falsely accuses one of his household staff of stealing his expensive video camera to make a fast buck. A day or so later, he approaches the young man, who is of roughly the same age, and apologizes.

Khan is aware that this is not the full-on resolution that audiences crave. “Maybe these 21-year-olds could have acted more heroically or decisively or stood up in the name of Pakistan and the downtrodden.” It might have been briefly liberating. But a feeder of delusions, he stresses, he is not. “I thought it better to stay true to the people the film was observing.”

Aside from Hasan, who eventually picks up his camera and presses record, and Aisha, who sets off for grad school in Boston, Khan prefers to leave a few loose ends and allow audiences to decide the fate of the others. “Maybe positive changes happen to their lives when the cameras stop rolling,” he suggests.

With imminent mainstream cinema releases set to directly tackle issues plaguing Pakistan’s citizenry – from blasphemy (Aik Aur Ghazi, One more holy warrior) to targeted killings (Kolachi, Port) to the war on terror campaign being fought inside the country (Waar, To strike) – it seems that parallel cinema is destined to take a back seat for the time being.

As frustrating as this may be, it should not deter artists from striving to develop this niche, according to actor Shahana Khan Khalil, the deputy director of Kuch Khass, The Center for Arts, Culture and Dialogue in Islamabad last May. With Pakistan constantly under the global spotlight, she says, Pakistanis are desperate for films to come out of their country. The flipside to this, she acknowledges, is that “audiences, at the moment, have unrealistic expectations that any new film will totally change the cinema industry over night.” But over time, she believes, filmmakers and audiences both will mature.

Khan agrees, although he is less optimistic. The key to transforming parallel cinema in Pakistan, he contends, poses a generational mission. “It should take birth through the visual literacy of tomorrow’s viewers – today’s children.” And while he admits that his current focus on British-based films may well lead to charges of his selling out, he has not completely given up on his Pakistan cinematic vision. “I feel the cause of film education is a more significant aim for me to pursue in Pakistan.” Through film education workshops, he hopes to address not only different narrative approaches but also different acting and filming styles. This, he jokingly adds, will potentially mean that audiences will no longer see handheld camera footage and assume the cameraman is drunk! Moreover, in the long-term, film education, he believes, will benefit everyone, including himself, making it easier to grow and collaborate with strong artists in an environment of progress rather than challenge. He reflects, “I am Pakistani-born, so I remain concerned about the future.”  “But”, he says, “as a filmmaker my allegiance is not to Pakistan, it is to cinema.”

For the time being, at least, he laments, “The road less traveled quickly leads to a cliff in Pakistan.”

Miranda Husain is a Lahore-based journalist and has worked at the Daily Times, Express TV, and The Friday Times. She is a special correspondent for Newsweek Pakistan.