Iram Haq

What Will People Say, Iram Haq (2017)

What Will People Say, Iram Haq (2017)

 

Iram Haq is a Pakistani-Norwegian screenwriter, film director, and actress. Her short film Little Miss Eyeflap premiered at Sundance and Aspen Shortsfest—I Am Yours, her feature debut, premiered at Göteborg, Trondheim, and Les Arcs European Film Festival, and was selected as the Norwegian entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 86th Academy Awards. Based on her own life experience, Haq's second film What Will People Say premiered at AFI Fest, where it won the Audience Award; Göteborg, where it won a Special Mention; Fribourg, where it won the Audience Award; and the Palm Springs Film Festival, where it won the Youth Jury Award.

In an exclusive interview with Filmatique, Haq discusses navigating life experience with cinematic depiction, telling a story from multiple points of view, the politics of filmmaking, and her next projects.

 

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FILMATIQUE: What Will People Say is a powerful depiction of a young Pakistani-Norwegian woman's journey to navigate and reconcile her dueling identities. The film touches upon themes of heritage, family, honor, freedom, and gender expectations as mediated through Nisha's vastly different cultural vantage points. For you, I imagine this is a deeply personal film insofar as it is based on your own life experience. Can you describe the moment you decided to become a filmmaker, and your process of translating this story to the screen?

IRAM HAQ: I wanted to be a filmmaker since I was very young. This film is very much inspired by my own experience—when I was a teenager I was kidnapped to Pakistan, and when I came back after a year I wanted to tell this story, but I knew that I was too young to be ready to tell it at that point. I was just sixteen, so I waited until I was grown up and had the courage to tell it in a wise way.

But my interest in writing and filmmaking came very early, I think I was about twelve or thirteen when I knew I wanted to be a storyteller. Growing up with my father watching Bollywood, going to the library and coming home with lots of books, that was something I enjoyed since I was a child. Then I began to act in my early twenties, and slowly started to write and make my own films.

FLMTQ: What Will People Say strikes me as particularly resonant today, as we witness increasing levels of social and political polarization, the oppressive effects of patriarchy, and general fear across the world. One of the film's great strengths lies in its nuance, its refusal to unequivocally take sides, and rather to depict conflict as rooted in competing narratives and/or misunderstanding. For example, in the film's penultimate scene, Nisha's father's expression of sadness or remorse at her fate unsettles our conception of him as a domineering and violent father. What role does nuance, or ambiguity, play in your work? And why do you think it is so important here?

IH: I was very much interested in understanding, for myself, my father and why he did what he did. I also wanted to do something different from the stories you read in tabloids and newspapers. I wanted to tell the story from the father's point of view as well, so you can understand where he comes from, and why he is like this—he's not just evil. I wanted people to see the kind of pressure he is under, so we can better understand why he acts so badly. I focused on making people understand why these type of conflicts arise when such different cultures meet.

 
What Will People Say, Iram Haq (2017)

What Will People Say, Iram Haq (2017)

 

FLMTQ: Maria Mozhdah delivers a stunning performance as Nisha, a richly complex character who can be both defiant and earnest, strong-willed and paralyzed. Can you describe your casting process for this film? How did you discover Mozhdah, and how did you work together both on and off-set to bring her character to life?

IH: It was such a big job to find the right girl. There were many girls who were not allowed to play this role, so the talent pool was not that big. But there were talents, and when Maria came for an audition I could immediately see that she had something very special. There was no doubt after I met her.

Maria is wonderful. She was just a teenager at the time of this film so she didn't have much experience, but she has talent and we worked very closely together onscreen and offscreen. She has an Afghani background so she doesn't actually speak Urdu—she learned her lines in Urdu and was very open, and really trusted me. She always knew that I would be there for her.

I feel like all actors need different ways of being directed. Adil Hussain, the actor playing father, has a lot of experience so he didn't need as much direction as Nisha, for example. But I believe the relationship should be very close between directors and actors.

FLMTQ: French theorist Jacques Rancière has argued that all art is political, insofar as art is representation and the subject of representation a political choice. By depicting Nisha's story, What Will People Say makes visible the life experience of countless women across the world whose stories have and continue to go untold. Do you agree with Rancière's assessment? How do you think about the potential of onscreen representation to shape our political views?

IH: This story is not just my story, this is a story that belongs to so many women. And there are so many people, not only women, who don't have a voice. I feel like I have the platform to tell people's stories, and that's a position that should be used in a good way. Since we have this possibility available to us, in a way I felt fortunate to have had this story that I went through, which is not only mine.

I feel like it's important to be political when you make movies. I'm not sure every movie is political—but you do make a choice about what you want to tell and what you want to spend the next two years working on when you write and direct. I feel like many European movies are political, not all of them, but many are. And I think we are lucky to have this platform to tell stories to teach people about other people's experiences.

 
What Will People Say, Iram Haq (2017)

What Will People Say, Iram Haq (2017)

 

FLMTQ: Are you working on any new projects at the moment, and if so, can you tell us a bit about them?

IH: I'm working on several things at the moment. We're aiming to shoot another feature film here in Norway next year, hopefully as we don't know yet. It's based on Tante Ulrikkes Vei, a famous novel by Zeshan Shakar about two boys with an immigration background, who are born and grow up in Oslo, amidst quite a white community. It's about how they are struggling to find their identity and their position in the country. It has nothing to do with criminality, like you normally see in films about immigrant boys—it's more about how to fit into a society, how to be a part of this world. It's a beautiful story and I hope that we will shoot it.

Besides that I'm writing my own feature film as well as a television series which is still in the early stages, about the first Pakistani immigrants who came to Norway.

 
 

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Interview by Ursula Grisham

Head Curator, Filmatique