My Mirror column:
Arshad Khan’s documentary memoir Abu bravely opens up a personal and familial history, touching on issues of cultural alienation, religion and sexuality.
"Migration is the hardest thing in the world. That, and coming out.” So says Montreal-based filmmaker Arshad Khan in the voice-over for his remarkably courageous autobiographical documentary Abu, which was screened yesterday as part of the sixth edition of the Dharamshala International Film Festival (DIFF). The 81-minute film, whose title is simply the Urdu word for father, is Khan’s attempt to grapple with his complex relationship with his late father: a Pakistani Muslim man who migrated to Canada in the 1980s and never really came to terms with his son being gay.
Abu’s unexpurgated deep dive into difficult issues draws on an astounding archive of VHS home videos taken during family gatherings in Pakistan, placing those grainy recordings of picnics and parties and weddings in conjunction with more recent iPhone and Flip-cam footage, as well as interviews that Khan shot with his mother, father and elder sister. “My family happens to be obscenely well documented. My father loved photography and he loved technology and documentation. We have photos from as far back as the 1930s,” Khan said in his statement to DIFF. This intensely personal — and often just intense — real-life footage is interspersed with other kinds of audio-visual material that leavens it with a much-needed playfulness, even humour. So, for instance, the religious certitude of his father’s dream — in which the old gentleman learns that he must visit the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem and make a Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca before his death, which the dream prophesied would happen at 3am — acquires a totally different register when Khan turns the dream’s constituents into a cheerful animated sequence.
At other times in the film, we move seamlessly from Khan’s recounting of some fraught personal moment into a classic Hindi film song. For members of Abu’s subcontinental audience, at least, these are transitions that provide momentary relief from documentary realism (as we allow ourselves the guilty pleasure of humming along with Dev Anand and Waheeda Rehman in Guide) – while also enabling that familiar amplification of emotion that popular Hindi cinema has always offered space for. The lyrics of the Guide song “Aaj phir jeene ki tamanna hai, aaj phir marne ka irada hai [Today I wish to live again, today I’ve decided to die again]” do assume new meaning when placed in the midst of a voice-over-led documentary about a gay man who’s describing the terrible self-hate he underwent for years as a teenager and young adult in Canada.
Watching Abu, I was reminded of a film made by another Pakistani Muslim man about another Pakistani Muslim migrant father: Ayub Khan-Din’s East is East. First performed as a play in 1996, East is East became a hugely successful 1999 feature film, with the late Om Puri putting in a spectacular turn as the baffled, angry, violent George Khan. Like the real-life Arshad, who wants nothing more desperately than to fit into the largely-white Canadian universe into which migration has catapulted him, George Khan’s British-born children – the product of George’s relationship with his British wife Ella – resent their father’s insistence on trying to make them fit his notion of good Pakistanis.
Although East is East is set in England in the early 1970s, and Abu unfolds in Pakistan and Canada from the 1980s to the 2000s, it is remarkable how similar the themes are. The fictional George presses his reluctant children to attend namaz at the local mosque, practically kidnaps his youngest son into a circumcision and tries his hardest to marry his elder sons off to suitable Pakistani girls without once conferring with them: one of them, Nazeer, abandons his bride on the wedding day and is later revealed to be living with his male partner. Arshad’s father, in a different time and country, responds to his suspicions about his son’s sexuality by turning rides in the family car into forced listening sessions for Islamic discourses about the evils of homosexuality, in which gay sex is only a step away from paedophilia, and not that distant from bestiality.
Unlike George Khan, though, religion seems to have given Arshad Khan’s parents a real sense of support, as economic migrants adrift in a culturally alien milieu. Meanwhile Arshad himself seems to have some fondness for the world his parents left behind. Unlike George’s daughter Mina (the stellar Archie Panjabi), whose rendition of 'Inhi Logon Ne' with a floor wiper and a dupatta is entirely comic, a subversive send-up of the Meena Kumari performance, Arshad’s incorporation of Pakeezah footage comes with fond nostalgic memories of his mother secretly dancing to Pakeezah songs on the record player – and footage of her actually dancing in a family gathering.
But the thing that makes Abu, like East is East, truly significant is an ability to see beyond simple ideas of villains and victims. These are parental figures that may seem cold-hearted and cruel to their children, but what these films so heartbreakingly make us see is that they are themselves vulnerable.
Published in Mumbai Mirror, Sun 5 Nov, 2017.
Arshad Khan’s documentary memoir Abu bravely opens up a personal and familial history, touching on issues of cultural alienation, religion and sexuality.
"Migration is the hardest thing in the world. That, and coming out.” So says Montreal-based filmmaker Arshad Khan in the voice-over for his remarkably courageous autobiographical documentary Abu, which was screened yesterday as part of the sixth edition of the Dharamshala International Film Festival (DIFF). The 81-minute film, whose title is simply the Urdu word for father, is Khan’s attempt to grapple with his complex relationship with his late father: a Pakistani Muslim man who migrated to Canada in the 1980s and never really came to terms with his son being gay.
Abu’s unexpurgated deep dive into difficult issues draws on an astounding archive of VHS home videos taken during family gatherings in Pakistan, placing those grainy recordings of picnics and parties and weddings in conjunction with more recent iPhone and Flip-cam footage, as well as interviews that Khan shot with his mother, father and elder sister. “My family happens to be obscenely well documented. My father loved photography and he loved technology and documentation. We have photos from as far back as the 1930s,” Khan said in his statement to DIFF. This intensely personal — and often just intense — real-life footage is interspersed with other kinds of audio-visual material that leavens it with a much-needed playfulness, even humour. So, for instance, the religious certitude of his father’s dream — in which the old gentleman learns that he must visit the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem and make a Hajj pilgrimage to Mecca before his death, which the dream prophesied would happen at 3am — acquires a totally different register when Khan turns the dream’s constituents into a cheerful animated sequence.
At other times in the film, we move seamlessly from Khan’s recounting of some fraught personal moment into a classic Hindi film song. For members of Abu’s subcontinental audience, at least, these are transitions that provide momentary relief from documentary realism (as we allow ourselves the guilty pleasure of humming along with Dev Anand and Waheeda Rehman in Guide) – while also enabling that familiar amplification of emotion that popular Hindi cinema has always offered space for. The lyrics of the Guide song “Aaj phir jeene ki tamanna hai, aaj phir marne ka irada hai [Today I wish to live again, today I’ve decided to die again]” do assume new meaning when placed in the midst of a voice-over-led documentary about a gay man who’s describing the terrible self-hate he underwent for years as a teenager and young adult in Canada.
Watching Abu, I was reminded of a film made by another Pakistani Muslim man about another Pakistani Muslim migrant father: Ayub Khan-Din’s East is East. First performed as a play in 1996, East is East became a hugely successful 1999 feature film, with the late Om Puri putting in a spectacular turn as the baffled, angry, violent George Khan. Like the real-life Arshad, who wants nothing more desperately than to fit into the largely-white Canadian universe into which migration has catapulted him, George Khan’s British-born children – the product of George’s relationship with his British wife Ella – resent their father’s insistence on trying to make them fit his notion of good Pakistanis.
Although East is East is set in England in the early 1970s, and Abu unfolds in Pakistan and Canada from the 1980s to the 2000s, it is remarkable how similar the themes are. The fictional George presses his reluctant children to attend namaz at the local mosque, practically kidnaps his youngest son into a circumcision and tries his hardest to marry his elder sons off to suitable Pakistani girls without once conferring with them: one of them, Nazeer, abandons his bride on the wedding day and is later revealed to be living with his male partner. Arshad’s father, in a different time and country, responds to his suspicions about his son’s sexuality by turning rides in the family car into forced listening sessions for Islamic discourses about the evils of homosexuality, in which gay sex is only a step away from paedophilia, and not that distant from bestiality.
Unlike George Khan, though, religion seems to have given Arshad Khan’s parents a real sense of support, as economic migrants adrift in a culturally alien milieu. Meanwhile Arshad himself seems to have some fondness for the world his parents left behind. Unlike George’s daughter Mina (the stellar Archie Panjabi), whose rendition of 'Inhi Logon Ne' with a floor wiper and a dupatta is entirely comic, a subversive send-up of the Meena Kumari performance, Arshad’s incorporation of Pakeezah footage comes with fond nostalgic memories of his mother secretly dancing to Pakeezah songs on the record player – and footage of her actually dancing in a family gathering.
But the thing that makes Abu, like East is East, truly significant is an ability to see beyond simple ideas of villains and victims. These are parental figures that may seem cold-hearted and cruel to their children, but what these films so heartbreakingly make us see is that they are themselves vulnerable.
Published in Mumbai Mirror, Sun 5 Nov, 2017.
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