In Conversation: ‘The Queen of My Dreams’ Director Fawzia Mirza
The Queen of My Dreams (2023) is the full-length directorial debut of Fawzia Mirza. The film follows the emotional journey of queer Muslim grad student Azra (Amrit Kaur) as she visits Pakistan after her father’s (Hamza Haq)’s sudden death. I had the opportunity to speak to Fawzia about her own artistic journey and filmmaking process.
The Queen of My Dreams speaks about what it means to not just be a mother but to be a daughter, too. It speaks of the past and the present, of the East and the West. About a motherland split into multiples. You spoke about this film as a way to connect to your past. But the history we witness also goes beyond a sense of self and intertwines in a world that goes beyond the borders of a community still reeling from the aftermath of such a profound loss and what it means to “move forward.” We witness this identical loss mirrored through the mothers and daughters for generations to come. How important was it for you to share the story as it was?
FAUZIA: The Queen of My Dreams was a short film I made over ten years ago. I also did this one-person show that was really personal to me in 2015. When I was thinking about how to adapt [it] as it was, it was a long journey to figure out what pieces I could keep from the play and what I could leave behind. The one thing I couldn't let go of was the song [“Mere Sapnon Ki Rani”] and Sharmila Tagore. But also the 60s in Pakistan, which was non-negotiable for me because I'd never seen that on screen.
I heard so many people talk about it [the 60s]—elders, family members, those pictures that started in Facebook groups, and now there [are] Instagrams about it. The Juggernaut talks about it. But there [are] so many stories that people have about this era that they just don't share anymore. I really wanted to keep and preserve that.
That was kind of my starting point for the layers I . . . needed and wanted in this film. I built everything else around that. The song, “Mere Sapnon Ki Rani,” had also been something that stuck with me for a long time. I wanted to preserve that part as well and tell a mother-daughter story. This isn't a film about partition, but I think it's really hard not to acknowledge what happened and what was done to us. I wanted something of that, as a part of a fracturing and as part of a history. We can't pretend that fracturing didn't happen to our ancestors.
The film title, of course, comes from the 1969 Sharmila Tagore hit and we see the hit track “Mere Sapnon Ki Rani” take different renditions throughout the film. As a queer South Asian myself, I think it was incredibly powerful being able to reimagine this epic romance of many of our childhoods and be able to reimagine the nostalgic soundtrack for a life with a love that could be ours. Could you share a bit more about how this idea came to be?
The idea kind of evolved over the years. As a brown Muslim kid growing up in a small town in Canada on the east coast of the ocean, there weren't a lot of other kids that looked like me. We were also quite far from food that reflected our family and our culture. My family would have to drive to another town to get groceries. They would also get movies and rent them. Part of going to the grocery store was bringing back the things that connected us to our culture, country, and community. I think my parents were watching these old Bollywood films and connecting to where they came from. I was also connected to that.
I love love, and seeing those films really impacted my sense of romance and fantasy. I love a grand gesture, I love music and I was swept up by that as a kid. It . . . instilled in me, the things that I dream about and the way I thought of romance. The song “Mere Sapnon Ki Rani” was something that I've been hearing my whole life. The title roughly translates to The Queen of My Dreams. There’s an iconic moment in the movie Aradhana, which is a 1960s film, where Rajesh Khanna is singing out of a Jeep to Sharmila Tagore on a train. I always thought, “Oh, yeah, some guy’s gonna sing me that song.” And then when I came out as queer, I was like, “Oh, yeah, some girl is gonna sing you that song.”
I realized that, yes, there's the romantic love aspect of The Queen of My Dreams but there's also a self-love aspect. I am the queen of my own dreams, not Bollywood's and not my mother's. That really shaped the evolution of the storytelling. . . . Part of the journey of this film is answering the question, “How do we become who we are?”
You can look at yourself, but to really understand and love yourself, you also have to understand those who came before you, and how they became who they are. I think this film . . . tells a story of just one small part of our ancestors' story.
Something that also really put me in awe was the tenderness of how you portrayed Pakistan, through all its technicolor and glamor and its yellows and blues. You mentioned briefly [in your press statement] about scenes being romanticized through memory. And we often hear about this sentiment, even in the Global South, of a glorious past that seems to never have touched us. Could you comment on your choice to reflect back on the 1960s and show it for what it was?
It's a bit of a fantasy. The more we analyze, understand, and reflect on the past, the more we can understand ourselves, and the more we can really shape an intentional, beautiful future. As we see, there [are] always patterns; things return, we live in cycles, and so, the past is the future.
I consider myself Pakistani and Indian. My family was born [in] pre-partition India. My parents were. I find the colonizer-made borders to be not our own but put upon us. The more we can see these stories that reflect the humanity of communities, the more we can see our similarities, and connect across these false borders.
Pakistan is only depicted in one way. In movies and TV shows, we have a few beautiful reflections that have changed some of that perception over the years, whether it's Miss Marvel or Joyland. But those are too few and far between. Some of it [her choice] was to show a country that was, but also that is and some of it was to show people who were, and maybe who still are, so it’s definitely layered.
Throughout this film, we see art, music, and food not only as a medium of human expression and creativity but also as a way to say what words cannot. We see how a mother and daughter who cannot even touch each other through moments of grief come together through a reimagining of this wonderful Bollywood hit. You speak about art saving your life and I think we as South Asian creatives find ourselves in this space where we have a moment of sudden clarity, where we understand that this is something we must do. How has your journey been pursuing art? How has art spoken for you?
My first short film that I made in 2012 was [also] called The Queen of My Dreams. I made that before I knew I was a filmmaker. I made it . . . trying to reconcile whether I could be queer and Muslim and love Bollywood romance all at the same time.
It was through that making that I was able to really externalize all the private struggles that I was having, and the turmoil I was in. And by making it and sharing that story, I . . . found comfort in being exactly who I am. It really made me think about the importance of sharing stories, of making film, of traveling with your film and talking about who you are, and the power of that.
It also encouraged me to make more films. You can really see in my journey—whether it's in the short films or the web series I made a feature in 2017, where Shabana Azmi played my mom, all the work I made—my level of comfort.
You can see my comfort in being who I am, through the work. Quite frankly, I'd say I came out as a queer person through making the work. There's a deep connection to filmmaking as a means of survival for me. It's true, it's personal. There's nothing more beautiful than . . . any of us sharing our stories.
I think one incredible aspect of the movie is also this idea of faith, and faith in particular to being queer. It’s not often we see stories centered in this way of really having identities understood through the multiple layers we do and it's not often we have them ringing these bells of hope either. How important does hope remain to the work you do?
I started making this work in order to have hope. I make films that center hope because as queer people, we know the trauma, we know the drama, we know the sadness, we know the struggle. We don't need to center it. In everything we make, we need to center the hope. . . . We need to manifest what is possible.
Part of why I started making [films] was because I didn't see that. I felt like I had to start making out of necessity because there was no one to look to [who] had all of those identities at the time in one character, movie, or show. I was like, “Well, I guess I have to do this for myself, just to survive.”
I think it is deeply Western and patriarchal to want to center our trauma stories. That's just not what I think we need and other people will be making those forever. I want to continue to tell stories where we can thrive because we need to thrive.
This interview has been edited for brevity & clarity.