My film wasn't turning out how I imagined — so I went back to something I'd shot 12 years earlier

Cutaways is a personal essay series where Canadian filmmakers tell the story of how their film was made. This TIFF 2023 edition by director Fawzia Mirza focuses on her film The Queen of My Dreams.

The opening image of a film sets the tone for the entire experience. It's that critical opportunity to introduce a character, a world, a feeling. You agonize over it as a writer — but you have to nail it as a director. 

The opening image in my feature directorial debut The Queen of My Dreams consists of two slides: the first of Mariam, the mother in the movie, brushing her hair; and the second, of actress Sharmila Tagore in a train, from her famous 1969 film Aradhana. As these images slide in and out, we hear voiceover. We soon learn that the voice belongs to Azra, Mariam's daughter. The film's title slides in. Then we slide into Azra's living room in Toronto, 1999. 

This capsule opening was not the opening I wrote for the film, or even the opening that we shot. It was a discovery in the edit room — or edit screen, I should say, since my editor Simone Smith and I worked remotely via Evercast. We'd been trying to nail the opening as scripted, as shot, to work in the cut for weeks. But I started to feel like even though the scene was cool on the page, it didn't feel as cinematic as I wanted or needed it to be.

We didn't have the resources to shoot a pick-up day; the film had been shot in two different countries (Canada, specifically Nova Scotia, and Pakistan, specifically, the city of Karachi), and the logistics of making all of that happen in an indie film were impossible. So I had to get creative. And I found the solution not in what we'd shot three months earlier, but what I'd shot 12 years earlier: my first short film, also titled The Queen of My Dreams. 

I made this short before I even knew I was a filmmaker. Picture this: a newly out gay, grappling with their identity (classic conundrum). I was trying to figure out if I could be queer AND Muslim AND love Bollywood romance. The answer may seem easy in 2023, but, girl, let me tell you, I did NOT have the answer back then. 

I had grown up watching heteronormative (and, I came to realize, quite homoerotic) Hindi language films where guy sees girl, girl plays shy and "hard to get," but ultimately girl can't help herself and girl gets seduced by guy. Love. Marriage. Drama. And, ultimately, a happy ending. It may seem counterintuitive to the feminist I am, but I. WANTED. THAT. LIFE. But I didn't know how to see myself in the patriarchal gender roles of this love story. 

So I rewrote the story into a short video piece, inspired by Indian cinema, as well as the song, "Mere Sapnon Ki Rani" (translation: "the queen of my dreams") and the film Aradhana. I cast myself, an outwardly masc-presenting lesbian, as the heroine, and cast another woman — the traditionally feminine and beautiful actor Mouzam Makkar — as the hero. I wanted to convey to audiences — but also to myself — that regardless of how a person outwardly presents, the fantasy can still go on. The fantasy MUST go on. Because if it doesn't, how can I be who I am? I'd have to give up some of my identities, in order to embrace the others. And, well, fuck that. 

I shot the footage with a small but mighty team: cinematographer Amanda Clifford, makeup/hair artist Gosia Gorniak, stylist/sari expert Kareem Khubchandani. My original plan was to find a gallery and screen the footage as part of a video art installation. But during a conversation with filmmaker Ryan Logan, he suggested it could be a short film.

I'd never written or directed a film before, but I trusted him implicitly, and we agreed to co-direct my story. I recorded the voiceover, and he edited together everything I'd shot into a three-minute piece that also included a scene from the original inspiration, the film Aradhana. I loved what he brought to the project. We made a movie!

It world premiered at Seattle International Film Festival, went on to play in the "Girls Shorts" program at Outfest and screened at 65 festivals around the world. My internal struggle had become pretty cool public art. 

It took another 10 years, countless collaborators and supporters, a one-person play version of this story I toured internationally, many more short films, a completely different feature film, losing people I loved and gaining new ones... but in the fall of 2022, I shot the feature The Queen of My Dreams. And in 2023, as I struggled to find the opening image to the feature film, I went back to the short film for inspiration.

And I found the answer.

What I needed was so simple: my story and my voice. Which led me to bring into the opening voiceover of the character Azra, playing over her memory of her mother and of her hero Sharmila Tagore. 

Making a movie isn't a seamless process. There are so many moving parts, and you have to be able to put all the pieces together. And you need to always move forward. But sometimes to move forward, you have to open yourself up to looking back. To the beginning. Or, in my case, to the opening.

The Queen of My Dreams screens at TIFF 2023 on Tuesday, September 12 at 10am.