Sarmad Khoosat on ‘Lali’, desire and subverting norms: ‘Wherever I can, I take off the top soil’

The most predictable thing about Sarmad Khoosat’s Lali is its unpredictability. The Pakistani director’s fourth feature, which he has co-written with Sundus Hashmi, is a thickly textured psychodrama about the strange marriage between Zeba and Sajawal.

Zeba (Mamya Shajaffar) is considered a bad omen. Sajawal (Channan Hanif) has a prominent birthmark on his face and . Sajawal’s insecurity and paranoia unsettle Zeba, her mother-in-law Sohni (Meher Bano) and the neighbour Bholi (Rasti Farooq).

Set in Sahiwal in Pakistan’s Punjab province, Lali braids together jinn lore, Sufi beliefs and contemporary gender politics. The Indus Valley Civilisation city Harappa features in one of the scenes. Khoosat rolls out striking colour-coded tableaus amidst brilliant music by Abdullah Siddiqui.

Lali is showing at the Indian Film Festival of Los Angeles (April 23-26). The Punjabi-language movie was premiered in Berlin in February – the first entirely Pakistani production to be given this honour.

Khoosat is a third-generation showbiz personality, the grandson of the actor Sultan Khoosat and the son of actor-filmmaker Irfan Khoosat. Sarmad Khoosat’s mother, Zahida Butt, was a well-known radio and television anchor.

Before films, Khoosat directed numerous television serials and telefilms. Some of the shows are popular in India, especially Humsafar, starring Fawad Khan and Mahira Khan.

In 2015, Khoosat made his feature debut with Manto. The biopic explores Saadat Hasan Manto’s life in Pakistan after Partition, and stars Khoosat as the iconoclastic writer. Manto’s stories gave Khoosat a window into transgressive ideas about society and politics, the 46-year-old filmmaker told Scroll.

Khoosat grew up in Lahore in the 1980s, when Pakistan was under Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq’s military dictatorship. “We were subjected to censorship in our school syllabi, and it was also hyper-Islamised,” Khoosat said. “Suddenly Manto comes to you and you realise you can have a voice, you can have your questions, you can talk human misery without making it miserable. You can talk skin, you can talk instinct.”

Manto was likely one of the inspirations for Khoosat’s own battles over free speech. Khoosat faced death threats for his 2019 feature Zindagi Tamasha, about a Muslim cleric who is filmed dancing at a wedding. Khoosat’s production of editor-turned-director Saim Sadiq’s Joyland (2022), about a married man’s entanglement with a trans dancer, was banned in parts of Pakistan.

Sadiq has edited Lali, which is aiming for a release in Pakistan in the coming months. Khoosat is hopeful that Lali will have a smooth journey despite its unorthodox themes and sexually bold exploration of a marriage.

Khoosat spoke to Scroll about family, Pakistani cinema and the question that has dogged viewers of Lali: what is the film trying to say? Here are edited excerpts from the interview.

What were your formative years like? What did it mean to grow up with parents who were involved with the entertainment industry?

I grew up in a regular, borderline lower-middle class Punjabi household with lots of children. My parents were serial marriers – including me, there are nine siblings in all.

My grandfather was the one who first entered the line, as my grandmother would say. My father did films and TV. My mother used to work in the radio.

Fame was something I understood early. My dad was in the massive hit TV show Andhera Ujala. It was impossible to go out with him. People would break queues to meet him. He wouldn’t be given a traffic ticket. When he showed up at school, the teachers would be starstruck.

It was an interesting childhood, but also a mystery. Only later, when I was in college and joined a film promotion agency run by my father, did I get a window into how the whole thing worked.

You spent many years in television. Some of your shows are hugely popular in India. Did television help your filmmaking in any way?

My journey started with a degree of authorial control. I started writing for TV with a bunch of friends, while I was still in college.

In those years, the film front was a dead landscape. It was only TV where you could own your craft and get money for sustenance. TV in Pakistan gets made insanely quickly. You can do a 30-part serial in seven or eight months.

I did fun stuff, like an adaptation of Chokher Bali, Rebecca and a Satyajit Ray story without knowing anything about copyright. From that weird, exploratory stuff, I went to Humsafar, which was commissioned and pre-written and followed set parameters.

I understood popularity and mass appeal with Humsafar. The validation earned me more opportunities. Nobody would have allowed me to make Manto if I hadn’t done Humsafar.

Humsafar can now be seen as problematic in some ways, but popular appeal works in its own twisted way. TV taught me the tricks, the little hacks. It taught me about independent filmmaking in terms of budgets, churning out a certain volume, working around tough schedules.

Oversimplified narratives, beautiful actors, really verbose stuff that has the zubaan [the Urdu language] – all of them work, and even in India. I remember I was on a panel in India, back in the good days when we could cross the border. Nandita Das and I were talking about our respective Manto films. Someone in the audience said, please just keep talking because you sound so sweet. I thought, I will get thrashed back home because my Urdu isn’t actually that good.

It does irk me that whenever we try and revive Pakistani cinema, we usually look at reheating Bollywood formulas from the ’80s and ’90s. Whereas, our dramas are distinctive. We have our own sets of eyes and experiences. We don’t channel these enough.

Your first film was a biopic of Saadat Hasan Manto. What drew you to this writer, who is shared between India and Pakistan?

Manto belongs to the subcontinent one hundred per cent. He moved to Pakistan a year after Partition and died in 1955. Compare those seven-eight years to all the years he spent in India.

Initially, the mystery and taboo and rock star aspects of Manto attract you. That’s how I approached him at a young age. He was uninhibited and was talked about in all the right and wrong ways.

As I grew older, the ideology started building. I realised that compared to whatever I had been taught up until then, one Khol Do story made me understand Partition.

There’s the sheer volume of his writing – short stories, sketches, radio plays, novellas. It amazes me that one mind had this capacity.

The other thing is accessibility. Manto saab doesn’t write supreme literary language. He doesn’t get annoyed with a lack of vocabulary. He bungs in whatever takes the flow forward. The craft is timeless and contemporary.

One of the strongest themes in your films is the inner workings of the family. You observe, question and subvert the institution. This is true of Kamli (2022) as well as Lali.

I feel caught. I feel exposed. But it’s true.

For me, the idea of family is very complicated. I find family and marriage problematic, particularly in this subcontinental, brown people’s sort of sensibility.

My feelings towards the joint family system comes from a reflexive, physiological space. Without going into sob stories, it was complicated, scarring, not in really ghastly ways, but in many small spicy ways.

I had so many questions about my parents’ marriage. I had blacked-out bits. My sister Kanwal, who’s also my producer, and I are like mirror images. We were isolated and emotionally locked in. We became expressive only after we grew up.

I unpack some of this in my films. There’s an undoing of what I had done in TV. Television is usually commissioned, it’s soapy and sugary and melodramatic. The whole thread is about holding the family together, whereas I have seen a lot of disintegration. I’m not blaming anyone – that’s how adults behave.

So I do the opposite of the paradigm. Wherever I can, I take off the top soil. In Zindagi Tamasha, Kamli and Lali, there is reflection, exploration and some pungency too.

In Lali, for example, a lot of people have asked me if Sohni Ammi is based on my mother. She was loud, Punjabi, and – I don’t know if it’s decent to call your mother that – a fertile woman. As a child, it was complicated to wrap your head around that.

Now, in a much later part of my life, I am picking on the cool and the spunk. Sohni Ammi has shades of my own mother, but I also wish my mother was more like Sohni, in terms of agency, control, the room to express herself.

The women in your films are complicated. In Kamli, three women pursue their desires despite social restrictions. Lali too has a trinity of misbehaving women.

Women are much more exciting, mysterious and layered. That’s also been my exposure. I grew up in a household where the male population was miniscule. I was always more fascinated by what the women were doing. The bedtime stories were always narrated by women.

It’s also about accepting the fact of the woman in you, your own feminine constitution. I once did a series called Aakhri Station, about seven women who meet in a train. At a panel discussion, someone said, it must have been tough for the producer to hire a man to tell this story.

I find this binary unnecessary, particularly in our part of the world, where women are definitely subjected to so much more. I owe so much to the women in my life, and many apologies too.

Both Kamli and Lali talk about loneliness in a strange way. I like the idea of creating walls that cave in on the characters.

What is the back story on the short story Kaala Kambal, on which Lali is based?

The author of Kaala Kambal is Nasreen Qureshi. She used to be a TV actor. I was fascinated by this lady who came from a bougie background and did acting for a hobby.

She is a brazen, unapologetic and funny human. Her short stories have bizarre, visceral, weird details about memory and skin. Much as I was fascinated with the stories, I didn’t know what to do with them.

When I started my film company, she gave me the rights to her book. Kaala Kambal is essentially the last scene of Lali. But her version of the male character is different.

What stayed with me was the idea of a room in the house that has a blanket in a cupboard. All of us at some point have gone under a blanket and played a jinn, become another creature.

The whole thing got unlocked when I realised that I didn’t need the last scene to define the rest of the film. I kept the scene as a fragment and extrapolated from there.

How did the black blanket become red?

A lot of Lali is about memories metamorphosing into other things, such as the joint family.

The film was initially meant to have a black blanket. Then I remembered when my mother had a stroke and was in a government-run hospital. It smelt like a gas leak, but the blankets were bright red.

There’s also this casual Sufi stuff around the characters in Lali – the singing, the colours, the old trees. The backdrop for the scene at the dargah is Harappa. There’s something about seeing the desolate city in the distance.

My other cross-border love is for Shiv Kumar Batalvi. I have been using his works since Manto. Lali was previously called Shikra, after the small birds that are there in the film and which feature a lot in Batalvi’s poems.

So there was this memory and the red of the shikra’s eye and blood. We got 11 shades of red.

Lali is full of narrative surprises and character shifts. Did the actors know how the story was going to proceed?

It started with a meditative approach in terms of craft and technique. The film itself is bizarre. We didn’t need to bring more bizarre to it. The direction, the camera and the production design were about stripping away things and doing less. That unlocked it for the actors.

Think Yorgos Lanthimos, not Poor Things, but Lobster. I didn’t want the world to look unrelatable. I’m not taking you into a vacuum.

The interplay in Lali was tougher than in the other films. Kamli was meant to look beautiful and picturesque and was easier to crack. With Lali, I wanted spunk. There were long scenes where nothing is happening. There were odd beats. I didn’t want to cue a certain weirdness. It was just a question of giving it enough time.

Many people in the crew said, we don’t know how to feel about the story. The cinematographer Khizer Idrees told me, I like it but I don’t know why I like it.

How was Lali received at the Berlin Film Festival? Do its themes travel easily beyond the subcontinent?

I am often asked if I think of a global audience. I find that to be an unnecessary question. It’s a burden on a film to be culturally so fair that it is understood by everyone.

The people at Berlin got the film. We had four screenings, and there were progressively fewer brown people. Viewers have their own interpretations. In fact, some people tend to over-read the film. They go all the way back to thousands of years of mythology.

I have stuck to a language and characters that resonate better with my primary audience, which is in Pakistan. A global audience is a perk, but the main audience will always be people who come from and live in that world. I would like to do some badassery but at the same time, I do not want to lose my primary audience. I don’t want Lali to be known as a festival film.

It’s tough to give a simple answer to the question of what Lali isabout. Is that the point?

The trailer is very misleading. Saim made sure of that. He called it diabolical. A lot of people think from the trailer that Zeba is a scammy woman who is marrying men and killing them.

The film’s voice is that of a woman. But I also didn’t want to turn Sajawal into a prototype of a horrible husband. Sajawal is trying to understand his connection with his mother.

It was always a Zeba-Sajawal story. Zeba is living some of her life through Sajawal and so is he. As the film started developing in the edit, it started inclining more towards Zeba. I told Saim that I wanted it to be more equal. Zeba’s arc is understandable, but Sajawal’s arc is much more complicated.

If I say that Lali is about family, the past that haunts you, marriage and the nightmares it brings, it sounds outright foolish. So I will just say, Lali has music and colour and ghosts and graves. I have stopped attempting to log line my own film.