After capturing the queer internet’s heart with an 11-minute rom-com in 2021, director, writer and actor Fawzia Mizra is back with her first full-length feature film, a moving and gorgeously shot ode to family, love, and obligation set primarily in Pakistan. In The Queen of My Dreams, a young, queer Canadian-Pakistani woman named Azra returns to her family’s ancestral home after the death of her father, where Azra’s coming-of-age story is juxtaposed with that of her mother, Mariam. (Sex Lives of College Girls star Amrit Kaur plays both Azra and a young Mariam to great effect.)
Recently, Vogue spoke to Mizra about seeing her film premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, following one story through various mediums, her Piscean love of romance, and the power of subverting typical filmic tropes about life in Pakistan.
Vogue: How did it feel to see your film premiere at TIFF this month?
Fawzia Mizra: I mean, it’s a cliche, but it was a dream come true. It was such a homecoming for the film, because I made the decision to be the director of this movie when I had the screenplay in the TIFF Writers’ Studio. To be in the light box, sharing the film for the first time with not just a public audience, but also the team that had flown in from Pakistan and Nova Scotia who had never seen it before, it was magical.
I know this film was a play previously, and a short film before that; what was it like to shepherd the story through so many different formats?
Well, the origin of the short film was me trying to work out whether I could be queer and Muslim and love Bollywood romance, because I was just trying to understand my identity. So it was like making art out of necessity, and it was so healing for me. Then I got into film festivals, and it made me want to create more. And I feel like this feature-film version of the story is kind of an assembly of all the work that I’ve done on myself. If you feel love watching it, it’s because it was made with love. It’s a representation of the amount of love that I’ve cultivated both for myself, for my mother, for mothers in general, for community, for country, for culture, for our ancestors, for where we’ve been, to where we are and where we can dream of going. It’s more than a movie; it’s a representation of who I am.
What was it like to tell two very different coming-of-age stories in the same film?
I’ve often found that I am so similar to my mother. And even though we present quite differently, and people view us as very different, we have some overlapping identities. There’s the way I laugh with my head thrown back and eyes wide open, and I know that energy of spirit and that essence of who I am comes from her. I’ve thought a lot about, like, if we share those similarities, there must have been other moments of similarity, right? So those coming-of-age stories are connected to me fantasizing that my mother and I must have been similar when we were younger. This film isn’t exactly her story or my story; it’s a fantasy, and it’s a bit of a romance. It’s like, what could have been? With the Mariam character in the 1960, some of that is inspired by collective memory and the history of the ’60s in Pakistan. I was just fantasizing, like, what could a love story have been like in that era, in that world, with those parameters?
I wanted to ask you about the role that Bollywood plays in the film. How did you figure out what archival cinema to use for maximum narrative effect?
I mean, as you know, there s the writing of the film, there’s the shooting of it, and there’s the editing of it. That’s the third and final stage of the writing. And I think some of those pieces came together in the edit, because all the archival footage being used as transitional pieces weren’t on the page; it was actually something that kind of came through the edit process, through my feeling that something was missing and wanting more of this connection to the past. The actress Sharmila Tagore was of the same era as the mother in this film, Mariam, and in many ways, [Tagore is] like the ideal woman, the perfect woman, and she never changes. And so she’s a bit of a touchstone for mothers. Going back to her and finding these additional connective points in that film kind of helped stitch together some of the story. The reasons that I’m even connected to Bollywood cinema and Hindi-language films was because my parents watched this stuff. They grew up in this tiny town in rural Nova Scotia, and, you know, how do you connect to country and culture? Through movies, so they’d go to the store to get lentils, spices, turmeric, chai, and movies. That was one of the ingredients that always came into our household. What they watched, I watched, and it became important to me.
I’m a Pisces, I love romance, I wear my heart on my sleeve, and so being lost in the fantasy of epic romance was something that was instilled in me at a really young age and has stayed with me. As a queer, Muslim person of color, the stories that have been told historically about us—not always by us–have often centered our trauma, the bleakness of our future, the terror within. And my mission as an artist has been to center our hope and our joy and our potential, so centering vibrant color isn’t just a fantasy, it’s possibility.
The Queen of My Dreams will next screen during the London Film Festival. It is currently seeking US distribution.
