Joyland
2022 · Saim Sadiq
For when you want a film to sit with — intimate, humane, quietly heartbreaking. Not a light watch, but a deeply rewarding one when you're ready to feel something real.
What it's about
In a crowded Lahore household anxiously waiting for a male heir, the family's gentlest son secretly takes a job in an erotic dance theatre — and falls into the orbit of Biba, its magnetic transgender star. What follows is less a forbidden-love story than a group portrait: a wife, a father, sisters-in-law, all straining against the roles a patriarchal family has assigned them.
The experience
Tender and slow-burning, with an ache the dialogue withholds and the images carry — neon and moonlight leaking into cramped rooms. It extends real warmth to everyone on screen, which makes its sadness hit harder; you leave moved and a little bruised.
Performances
Alina Khan plays Biba with a guardedness the camera treats as sovereignty — magnetic on stage, wary off it, never reduced to a symbol.
The craft
Saim Sadiq shoots in a boxed, nearly square frame that presses his characters together, then lets color bleed in at the edges; the compositions do the emotional work the characters can't say aloud. For a debut, the control of tone — hovering between romance, family drama, and tragedy without tipping into melodrama — is remarkable.
Why it matters
The first Pakistani film ever selected for Cannes, where it won the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize and the Queer Palm, then survived a censorship battle at home to become Pakistan's Oscar entry — announcing a new Pakistani cinema in a single stroke.
Reception & legacy: how Joyland was received, argued over, and remembered →
Saim Sadiq's debut announced a new Pakistani cinema to the world in a single stroke: the first film from the country ever selected for Cannes, where it took the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize and the Queer Palm, then survived a censorship battle at home to become Pakistan's Oscar entry. Set in a crowded Lahore household waiting anxiously for a male heir, it follows the family's gentlest son into the backstage world of an erotic dance theatre and toward Biba, its magnetic transgender star — played by Alina Khan with a guardedness the camera treats as sovereignty. Sadiq shoots in a boxed, nearly square frame that presses his characters together, then lets neon and moonlight leak in at the edges; the compositions carry the ache the dialogue withholds. What could have been a message film is instead a group portrait, extending real curiosity to every member of the family the patriarchy deforms — including the women it claims to protect. The title names an actual Lahore amusement park, its Ferris wheel turning over the rooftops like a promise.
Lines of influence
- All That Heaven Allows (1955) — Establishes the social-melodrama grammar where expressive colored lighting and glossy artifice externalize a forbidden desire that the community will not sanction.
- Ali: Fear Eats the Soul (1974) — Uses doorway, banister and mirror tableaux to physically box its taboo lovers inside the architecture of a judging society — the same framing-as-entrapment Sadiq applies to Haider and Biba.
- In a Year of 13 Moons (1978) — Centers a trans protagonist through theatrical melodrama and an indifferent, brutalizing cityscape, modeling how to grant a marginalized body operatic emotional scale.
- Fire (1996) — Stages forbidden queer desire inside the pressure-cooker of a South Asian joint-family household — the domestic-repression melodrama (and censorship firestorm) Joyland inherits directly.
- In the Mood for Love (2000) — Encodes unconsummated longing through saturated color, cramped corridors and doorway-slice compositions, teaching restraint where desire is felt in the framing rather than shown.
- Monsoon Wedding (2001) — Builds a teeming multigenerational urban South Asian household as ensemble portrait, layering class, repression and secrets under saturated festival color.
- Fish Tank (2009) — Deploys the boxy Academy 1.37 ratio to hem a working-class protagonist tight against the frame edges, the exact aspect-ratio-as-confinement strategy Joyland adopts.
- A Separation (2011) — Choreographs an ensemble domestic drama in which the camera withholds moral judgment while patriarchal law and family duty grind competing claims — the pressurized household staging Sadiq mirrors.
- Moonlight (2016) — Renders suppressed queer desire and tender masculinity through neon-saturated expressive close-ups and a chaptered intimacy that dignifies interior feeling.
- Darling (2019) — Sadiq's own award-winning short prototypes the erotic-theatre backstage world and casts Alina Khan, the direct authorial seed from which Joyland's craft grows.
- Tangerine (2015) — Places trans leads at the center of a vibrant, saturated urban milieu, elevating marginalized-body melodrama through kinetic, non-condescending performance framing.
- A Fantastic Woman (2017) — Constructs a trans protagonist's dignity through sustained, unflinching close framing and heightened melodrama that refuses to reduce her to victimhood — the register Alina Khan's Biba shares.
- Rafiki (2018) — Stages banned queer romance in a candy-neon saturated palette against social conservatism, pairing expressive color with real-world censorship as Joyland does.
- Girl (2018) — Tracks a trans body's discipline and yearning inside a performance discipline (ballet) through intimate, performer-driven handheld framing.
- And Then We Danced (2019) — Ignites queer desire within a conservative dance-performance milieu and provokes real censorship backlash, twinning backstage-performance staging with social taboo.
- Zindagi Tamasha (2019) — A New Pakistani Cinema work that confronts moral conservatism and the censor board head-on, extending the movement's realist critique of Lahore-adjacent piety and shame.
- Close (2022) — Frames tender same-sex intimacy crushed by peer and social pressure in a melodramatic register, sharing Joyland's grammar of soft closeness policed by others.
- In Flames (2023) — Extends New Pakistani Cinema's urban dread and study of women hemmed in by patriarchal structures, carrying forward the movement's Cannes-facing formal ambition.