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It won Best International Film at the Independent Spirit Awards and is now playing in select U.S. theaters.
The ban came as a surprise, Sadiq tells Vulture.
I wasnt alone when I found out.
I was with all the producers on a call.
Then everyone started gathering at my house the actors, the casting director, the crew.
Suddenly, there were 20 to 30 people there, and we decided that we wouldnt stay silent.
But we decided we were going to give a shot to set a new precedent.
We were going to change things.
Art is inherently political, says Sadiq.
However, I didnt expect that the politics would step out of the art and suddenly become something bigger.
I almost felt like I had to turn into a politician for a couple of days.
But while writingJoyland, his first feature, the 32-year-old found that lesson limiting.
They understood and identified with that.
A record number of 20 transgender Pakistani people werekilledin 2021.
(According to theTrans Murder Monitoringproject, the country averages ten homicides of transgender people per year.
)Joylandis one of few Pakistani films to feature a transgender lead.
Still, Sadiq initially hesitated to callJoylanda queer film.
Theres a lot of queerness in the movie, but queerness is not exclusively an identity, he says.
Its a term that encapsulates far more than just your sexuality and who youre attracted to.
The essence of queerness is a big challenge to patriarchy.
Its a big challenge to set roles that go far beyond just sexuality and gender.
I see queerness everywhere in the movie, even in the straight relationships.
All of the actors who playedkhwaja siraarekhwaja sira, he says.
He asked them to make their own choices while filming, independent of the script.
Joylands most vocal conservative critics admitted early on that they had not actually seen it.
But now Im at a stage where Im quite happy about it.
We did lead to a first step in a very important conversation in Pakistan, Sadiq says.
This conversation about trans rights and queerness is not a ghost conversation anymore.
