Da Khwar Lasme Spogmay

Die,Danger,Die,Die,Kill! always satisfies. One of their latest offerings is the depraved and shameless Pakastani film, Da Khwar Lasme Spogmay.


The film's merits and storyline are expertly detailed in the post:

Despite being classified as a horror film, DKLS is in equal parts an ill conceived superhero tale, a mangy hybrid of Catwoman and The Incredible Hulk. Its heroine, Banno, is a young woman who periodically transforms into a ferocious half cat, half human creature and prowls the night in search of rapists. In the opening scene, she catches one such devil in the act, and, after gruesomely mauling him with her knife-like claws, uses her telekinetic vision to spread his legs apart so that she may more easily ram a huge tree branch up his ass. Yow! In classic Pashto film tradition, this sequence is accompanied by abundant stock footage of thunder and lighting, a blaring and ceaselessly hectoring music track, and teeth rattling sound effects that include a heavily reverbed cat's yowl.

Here's a clip for your enjoyment complete with annoying feeder graphics.


Not so sure Kenneth Anger wasn't involved in this. It's one of the stranger things I have ever seen.

The House Of Bilquis Bibi - Tamasha: London, England (7/2010)

Directed by Sudha Bhuchar

The mother figure has long stood as a central figure in Asian art, literature, and cinema, so it comes as little surprise that a dominant matriarch would take centre stage in Tamasha theatre company’s latest production. Having given us George Khan, the fierce Pakistani patriarch of their hit 1989 play, East Is East, Tamasha’s co-founder/writer Sudha Bhuchar presents the world with his female counterpart in The House of Bilquis Bibi.

Making her UK stage debut is veteran Indian singer and actress Ila Arun who plays the formidable lady in question. As the Pakistani mother of five unmarried daughters (Ghizala Avan, Vineeta Rishi, Shalini Peiris, Mariam Haque and Youkti Patel), Bilquis Bibi rules her house with an iron rod, almost literally. Brandishing her walking stick like a sword, she domineers her daughters, each of whom is trying to cope with the death of their father, Bilquis’s second husband.

Stricken with diabetes, her task of managing an all female household in mourning is further aggravated by her senile mother (Indira Joshi) and feisty maid servant, Bushra (the excellent Rina Fatania), on whom she relies on for the administration of life saving medication. Having agreed for her eldest girl Abida to marry her younger nephew Pappo, with their union comes the hope of love and new life in America. Conveniently turning a blind eye to the forbidden nightly visits Pappo pays to his fiancée’s balcony, it’s not until Bilquis realises that more than one of her daughters is staying awake for him that the real drama kicks in.

A zealous adaptation of Federico García Lorca’s masterpiece, The House of Bernarda Alba, Tamasha’s Bhuchar and co-founder and director Kristine Landon-Smith turn for to their favourite Spanish poet, dramatist, and theatre director for inspiration for the third time in their company’s history. Transporting one of his most famous plays from 1930s Spain to modern day Pakistan’s rich Punjab region, The House of Bilquis Bibi tells a personal story of suffocated small town lives with global ties. While the setting may be decades and continents apart, the core story and female characters remain as real and relevant today as they were during Lorca’s time.

While The House of Bilquis Bibi may not be Tamasha’s most ambitious productions, it is one of the most important. Besides giving a platform to a rare all female cast of nine, it also underlines Tamasha’s twenty-one-year history, an amazing body of work and the fact that one of the UK’s most successful Asian theatre companies started life as a project dreamt up by two friends in a small flat in Crouch End. For that Bhuchar and Landon-Smith must be applauded.

Review by Jaspreet Pandohar

The House of Bilquis Bibi runs until October 2, 2010. Click here to read Jaspreet's full review at The NRI.

Made in Pakistan

Directed by Nasir Khan
Talking Filmain



These days, political analysts on both sides of the aisle are calling Pakistan a failed state. While the “most dangerous place in the world” does face profound political and social turmoil, such sweeping commentary fails to capture the more personal intricacies of the lives of ordinary people living inside the country’s borders. Pakistan is more than the Taliban fighters implementing Sharia law in the Swat Valley, and it’s more than the frequent bombings of embassies and hotels from Islamabad to Karachi. As a way of countering the predominant fundamentalist image of Pakistanis constructed by the global media, filmmaker Nasir Khan recently released a poignant documentary that defies stereotypes and sheds light on some of the common challenges faced by citizens with lofty and patriotic ambitions.

Made in Pakistan presents the way a new generation of young leaders negotiates the conflicting pulls of consumerism, family, politics, gender, religion, and traditionalism. The film follows four educated, upper middle class, young Pakistanis in Lahore—a working mother, a lawyer, an event/PR manager, and a politician—from General Pervez Musharraf’s declaration of a state of emergency and military takeover in November 2007 to former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto’s assassination in January 2008. Waleed Khalid is a lawyer and professor at the Pakistan College of Law. He is a devout, but not uncritical, Muslim who has joined others employed in the judicial system to protest government corruption, in part fueled by American aid. In addition to raising her son, Rabia Aamir is the editor of The Fourth Article, a newly established magazine by and for politically savvy Pakistani youth. Aamir is a cultural activist who wants to find solutions to the political, social, and spiritual upheaval in the country. These two characters were the ones with whom I felt most sympathetic.

On the other hand, we have Tara Mahmood, a girl for whom the whole world is one big party waiting to happen, and she’s the one organizing it. Tara provides a lot of comic relief to an otherwise weighty film (at one point she says, "Alcohol is not banned here; it is just not legally sold."), and I was particularly moved when finally given the chance to see beyond her bubbly veneer. By contrast, duplicitous politician Mohsin Warraich provides an ominous, slimy representation of modern Pakistan: The film doesn’t have an outright villain, but if it did he’s be the one. Made in Pakistan is a compelling view of the immense contradictions of modern Pakistani society.

Review by Mandy Van Deven

Originally published in Bitch Magazine

Lahore with Love: Growing Up with Girlfriends, Pakistani-Style

By Fawzia Afzal-Khan
Syracuse University Press

A poet’s power lies not only in her well-crafted images but in the rhythm of her recitation. As I read Lahore With Love, the memoir of Fawzia Afzal-Khan, I longed to hear her read the volume aloud. Many parts of her story poured out in a stream of consciousness, and her anecdotes deftly wove between youth and adulthood, lighthearted desires and the pain of loss, politics and the laughter of girlfriends.

Afzal-Khan interweaves her personal story with key elements in the history of the establishment of Pakistan, her homeland, which was formed just ten years before her birth. The painful string of military dictatorships running her country creates a mirror for the tragic experiences endured by her girlfriends. As she writes, with foreboding, “I have sensed disaster coming their way, my way, my country’s way.” In some ways, Afzal-Khan escaped disaster: she is a professor in the English Department at Montclair State University (New Jersey), a scholar of postcolonial studies, a poet, and an actress. Yet while she lives a successful life in the United States, she carries with her a complicated sorrow and relief, a pain of loss that is aggravated each time she visits Pakistan and sees some new wounds inflicted upon her home and her loved ones.

Lahore With Love gives us vignettes of upper middle class life in a culture where propriety called for gender-segregated social gatherings, but someone was always ready to break rules. The line between acceptable “colonial” habits (Catholic school) and the dangerous “Western decadence” (art school) was at times thin and slippery. As the author forges her own self-identity, the nation also seeks a shape; she heads to the U.S. to obtain her PhD, and Pakistan begins to undergo Islamization, with new layers of reactionary rules added to the old. There is nothing dry about the presentation of material; in one bloody chapter, the story of Shia martyrs is juxtaposed with bullfighting in Spain.

At times I would have enjoyed seeing the vignettes fleshed out more fully, and I suspect some readers will want a volume of Pakistani history by their side to read further about incidents to which the author refers. However, any changes to the unique narrative structure would detract from the author’s intense style. Her voice is the one we use when we long for a reunion with dear friends who are now gone, or hunger to return to the past to stop tragedy from striking, or barely restrain our anger at the callousness of our fellow humans.

Afzal-Khan asks, “Are we doomed to inhabit this binary universe or can we challenge the system that turns us into the roles we wear like selves?” She sets for the reader a powerful mold-breaking example when she self-identifies as “actorsingerpoetactivistmemoirist.”

Review by Lisa Rand

Transforming Faith: The Story of Al-Huda and Islamic Revivalism Among Urban Pakistani Women

By Sadaf Ahmad
Syracuse University Press

In Transforming Faith, Sadaf Ahmad explores the role of Al-Huda, a women’s Islamic religious school, in promoting the spread of a particular kind of Islam, especially among educated middle- and upper-class women in Islamabad, Pakistan.

Ahmad sets the scene by situating her topic in an historical and global context. She provides a broad overview of the various branches of Islam, and she tells the history of Pakistan’s self-conception as an Islamic state. She describes how Pakistani leaders have drawn discursively on certain flavors of Islam in order to consolidate political power, and how those choices laid the foundation for today’s increasingly conservative politico-religious milieu in Pakistan. Ahmad also links these developments to contemporary global pressures, including the hegemonic and military threats to Pakistan that accompany the skyrocketing Islamophobia in the West.

Against this backdrop, Ahmad explores the growing movement of Islamic women’s religious education, which takes place through small dars, classes for neighborhood women about technical and practical dimensions of Islam that are usually run out of one woman’s home, and through the larger, more institutional Al-Huda network. Its official branches and smaller, less formal dars are run by Al-Huda graduates.

Drawing on a body of carefully selected theory, Ahmad sensitively situates her description of the Al-Huda movement (which in many ways promotes a rigid, patriarchal form of Islam) in its political and cultural context. She notes that women are often positioned by the modern state as the “keepers of tradition,” and that women (especially Muslim women under the Western gaze) are perceived to be helpless victims of patriarchal and state pressure. While she does not hesitate to identify Al-Huda’s flavor of Islam as reactionary, she is also careful to tease out the complex reasons that women seek out Al-Huda and find its teachings transformative and personally meaningful.

On the whole, I found the book extremely nuanced and insightful; however, I did feel that one key element was missing. I found it strange that Ahmad does not discuss the communal feminist aspects of Al-Huda and the dars. Large numbers of women are organizing themselves and each other to obtain highly technical religious knowledge without the mediation of male teachers. In fact, Al-Huda promotes Arabic literacy to enable women to develop a direct relationship with the sacred text of the Qu’ran. It seems that this growing expertise might enable women to take more of a role in defining what it means to be a devout Muslim (and a devout Muslim woman in particular), which could have far-reaching implications. The lack of discussion of this question is puzzling.

Ultimately Transforming Faith is an exploration of the role of pedagogy in producing social and cultural change. How do teachers (in whatever sense of the word) identify and recruit a body of students? In a given sociopolitical context, how do teachers discursively situate their chosen body of knowledge (or, as Foucault would say, technologies of the self) against the backdrop of their students’ lives? What makes it possible to convince students to use those technologies of the self to discipline themselves into “ethical/pious subjects” (as Ahmad writes, drawing on Foucault and Mahmood)? In what way does the state co-opt those particular “ethical/pious subjects” for its own ends? In what ways do “ethical/pious subjects” develop a particular vantage point for resistance?

With its complementary combination of critical history, theory, and ethnography, Transforming Faith is an excellent—and thoroughly readable—case study for examining these questions.

Review by Ri J. Turner