In Flames

Mariam lives with her younger brother and her mother in a small apartment in Karachi. When Mariam's grandfather dies, his brother tries to persuade, even force, the two women to sign over their apartment to him - a practice that is unfortunately not uncommon in Pakistan, a country where women's property rights are not clearly enshrined in law. Disappointed by her mother's defensive attitude, Mariam spends more and more time with her fellow student Asad. Mariam is exuberant and decides to go on an outing with Asad. It ends traumatically. Plagued by overwhelming feelings of guilt, Mariam is assailed by horrific nightmares and the boundaries between this world and the hereafter gradually seem to blur... In his first feature-length film, Zarrar Kahn interweaves the building blocks of horror cinema with feminist criticism of contemporary Pakistani society with a light hand, without ever lapsing into lecturing. Instead, the images of (socially regulated) spaces and the gazes and gestures of the people who move around in them are much more eloquent than any verbose dialog. The fact that patriarchy is sheer horror has rarely been expressed more skillfully in a film.