Joyland poster

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 theater — 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.

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 theater 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.

Reception

Premiered at Cannes 2022 as the first Pakistani film ever in the festival's official selection, winning the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize and the Queer Palm — then got banned in its own country weeks before release. The ban was partially reversed after an international outcry (Punjab kept it), and it's since settled in as the landmark of new Pakistani cinema.

How Joyland was received, from release to now →

Influences: the films it descends from and the films it influenced

  • 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-theater backstage world and casts Alina Khan, the direct authorial seed from which Joyland's craft grows.
  • 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.
  • 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.

Similar films

All the films related to Joyland →

Watch it with: curated runs of related films

  • Love Against the Grain — A run of films where desire refuses the shape its world demands — opera stages, drought-struck Taipei, an honor-bound Lahore household, drenched Buenos Aires — and burns brighter, and more dangerously, for the refusal.