words Paul Risker
Canadian actress turned director, Fawzia Mirza’s feature debut, The Queen of my Dreams (2023), begins on the cusp of the millennium in Toronto, where 22-year-old Azra (Amrit Kaur) lives with her girlfriend. Her open homosexual relationship and pursuit of a career in acting has put a strain on her relationship with her conservative mother, Mariam (Nimra Bucha). When her father has a fatal heart attack while visiting Pakistan, Azra travels to the country of her parents’ birth, where she uncovers her mother’s past and non-conformist identity.
Inspired by her mother’s story, The Queen of my Dreams is a deeply personal and reflective film. Mirza’s shorts include the comedies I Know Her (2019), about an ill-advised one-night stand, and Auntie (2022), which sees a 39-year-old woman experience a happy hour hangover when she ends up in a group chat with a group in their twenties. She has also co-directed the haunted house short Shadow (2019) and her television credits include the LGBTQ+ comedy drama Hidden Canyons (2020-).
In conversation with Flux Magazine, Mirza spoke about the uniqueness of her personal and professional journey. She also discussed the broken mechanisms of the film business, responded to Isabelle Huppert’s concerns about the future of cinema, and reflected on The Queen of my Dreams’ philosophical and universal themes and ideas.
How would you describe your relationship with cinema?
I learned about the grandness of love and romance from the movies. Probably sex, too. I went to law school, not film school, so I came into this a little backwards. I made my first short film before I was a filmmaker, and I didn’t start directing until four years ago, and I met my wife at a film festival. Cinema is part of my DNA. It’s one of my loves and now my livelihood. Given that my wife and I have a production company together – Baby Daal Productions – cinema is our future.
Isabelle Huppert, head juror at this year’s Venice Film Festival, has expressed concerns about the future of cinema, owing to its current “very weak” condition. In the past year, there have been discussions about how cinema is no longer the dominant art form. Do you share Huppert’s concerns, and what are your thoughts about the crisis of cinema’s diminishing dominance?
We know that people are going to the theaters to see movies less and less. I have been thinking a lot about how the distribution system for films is broken. You can make a great movie, but if no one buys your movie, how can anyone see it? Gatekeepers are making decisions about what gets bought, not based on great films, but on algorithms, celebrities and films that clearly fit into a box.
Audiences have expressed they are tired of reboots, remakes and formulaic storytelling, but writers are being replaced by robots. So, the system isn’t necessarily listening to the people.
Yeah, I’m afraid about what’s next for cinema but I’m going to keep making movies, because I have faith in humanity, and I believe in the power of storytelling.
What was the starting point for The Queen of my Dreams, and what compelled you to tell this story now?
I was struggling with reconciling my identities – I was an actor at the time, so I’d shot footage that I was going to turn into a multimedia performance art piece. But a filmmaker friend of mine, Ryan Logan, said he thought my footage could be a movie, and he helped me turn my struggle into a 3-minute short [The Queen of my Dreams, 2012]. Making that saved my life and sharing it gave me a community where my voice mattered.
The big dream at the time was to write and perform a one-person show, so with the help of Catharsis Productions out of Chicago, I adapted the short into just that. I got to perform the play all over, including three cities in Pakistan. I even made a documentary about that complicated journey called The Streets Are Ours that you can watch online. I wrote more, made shorts, and a feature, Signature Move. So, by 2017, I felt like I could potentially adapt this one-person show into a screenplay.
It took me a while to find the right configuration of people, the story, the world, and myself, but we got there. During this time, I met my wife and producer, Andria Wilson Mirza. She said she wanted to produce the film and helped me get it funded in Canada.
When we spoke at the BFI London Film Festival, you said the story is inspired by the personal, but it’s also inspired by collective history, memory and fantasy. I’d be interested to discuss these layers and how you weaved them together throughout the story, especially the more objective collective history with the personal aspects of memory and fantasy. Or would you challenge my way of describing the balance of the subjective and the objective?
Anything I work on is influenced by the personal – that’s my POV. But when I was adapting this screenplay, it really clicked for me when I let go of the play and embraced the characters and fantasized a romance during such a romantic era. For two characters who sort of resemble people like my mother and father, what might their love story have been like in the places I had heard so much about, during the 1969 ‘Golden Era’ of Pakistan? And there are pieces of me throughout the film – I did have to do that chicken dance on a cable access show. But I wrote thirteen-year-old Azra with the groundedness and clarity of an adult.
To what extent is the film about generational tension between progress and cyclical patterns of behaviour?
We’re all unique, but also, I think we’re archetypes. We follow patterns of behaviour shared by those who came before us. The more we can see those patterns, those cycles, the more we can be clear about who we are and how to be our best self.
Mariam is an older version of her daughter, but for a time Azra cannot see it. Is The Queen of my Dreams about how we must grow up and restrain our rebellious, even idealistic spirits, after enjoying the wild years of our youth?
I don’t think it’s about “restraining” anything – Mariam changed. People change; we all change. It’s a universal truth, regardless of religion, identity, culture, family, etc. And maybe changing helped Mariam survive what she was dealing with. Who are we to judge? I’d suggest one thing the film is about is submission. The more you can submit, let go, release, heal and breathe, the more you can just be who you are. And then you can find the highest forms of love, joy and compassion.
The Queen of my Dreams is about characters learning to understand one another. Would you agree that we, the audience, watch and experience films to better understand ourselves?
I’m not making movies for myself. I’m making them for us, the audience – for us to have an experience, to grow, to learn, to feel, to “laugh and cry at the same time” as many audience members have told me.
Is this a political film, and more broadly speaking, would you agree that all art is political?
When I first started coming out, I’d introduce myself to women at bars as 50% gay and 50% Muslim. I never thought I was being political by claiming that I am queer, Muslim and South Asian. But I am inherently politicized. So, I have come to terms with the fact that anything I make will inherently be seen as political or promoting an agenda. I’ve kind of embraced it. Queen is a love story between a mother and daughter, and I believe love is revolutionary.
The Queen of my Dreams is released theatrically in the UK on 13th September by Peccadillo Pictures.
