LAHORE – Akifa Mian’s short film Inaam was screened at Cinegold, Bahria Town, on Saturday in the galaxy of various stars. Inaam made its mark in the 13th London Asian Film Festival 2011. Inaam, a short film which has universal appeal, is a story based on a young man who struggles as an immigrant in a new culture. Inaam was shot in London with an international cast and crew.
The film is based on socio political issues faced by Pakistani immigrants living in a small community in the United Kingdom. This is a drama about Inaam, a Pakistani lawyer who comes to the UK to practice law. He lives a life where he sees his dreams drifting away from him every day. The vicious cycle of sending money back home and then becoming broke never seizes as he gets stuck in a world of the minicab business in gritty London.
Throughout the story, Inaam encounters prejudice and hostility from all sides; from David, his regular English customer, from his unsympathetic Bangladeshi boss Abdul; and from his various fares. Inaam cannot seem to accept the fact that surviving in a country that does not seem to want him means becoming virtually weatherproof.
People from various walks of life attended the premiere of Inaam. Asghar Nadeem Syed, Wassi Hassan, Salman Shahid, and Wajahat were among the guests. Lauding the efforts of Akifa Mian, they said that this could bring about a change in Pakistani cinema. Zeeshan, a boy who watched the movie, said he was amazed by the quality of work.
He said that Akifa used the latest technology to shoot the film and she has become a role model for the upcoming directors and the students of film-making. He said that watching the movie in the beautiful Bahria cinema was itself a wonderful experience and that he really felt proud that a Pakistani has made such a movie.
ABOUT THE DIRECTOR: Inaam is a brainchild of Akifa Mian, writer, director and producer, and also an assistant professor at Beaconhouse National University, Lahore. This project was a result of four months of research in the South Asian immigrant cab industry in London.
The main character ‘Inaam’ was from Lahore, Pakistan, as she wanted to show the suffering of immigrants who come from underdeveloped countries. She wanted to show how the immigrants keep longing for home, their struggles, their fear and the lack of assimilation into local culture and the feeling of being lost in a western setting.
“The aim of the film was to create a story which gives people a snapshot of this particular immigrant community who are surrounded by uncertainty and unlike the Pakistani immigrants who came to London 20 or 30 years ago,” she said. It is a universal story which can resonate beyond all immigrant communities.
Even though looking back at the history of human civilization, we are all immigrants, some more recent and some a few centuries old.
