Pakistani filmmakers are adorning international screens. Director Shehrezad Maher’s recent film The Curfew took stage at Venice Biennale on 4 September.
The film stars Sathya Sridharan, Balinder Johal, Sara Haider, Rajesh Bose, Chris Thorn and Salwa Khan. It is produced by Lindsay Blair Goeldner and Meetra Javed. Its cinematography has been done by Dustin Lane and production design by Ana Novacic. It is being distributed by Fae Pictures and Baby Daal Productions.
The 19-minute film is about Pakistani American Ayaan who cares for his frailing grandmother. As he does so, the two fight the silence of a language barrier and try to learn each other’s language. The film shows how histories and ghosts from a colonial past can affect the present.
Shehrezad Maher won the 2023 Islamic Scholarship Fund’s National Film Grant for The Curfew. She is a New York-based artist and filmmaker and her films have been screened at institutions and festivals such as Visions du Réel, RIDM, the LA Film Forum, Anthology Film Archives, UnionDocs, and Experiments in Cinema.
Her feature film script, Theory of Colors, was one of the three projects selected for the 2023 Hamptons Film Screenwriters Lab and received the Melissa Mathison Screenwriters Fund and the Cinestory Feature Retreat’s Hagan Hicks Underrepresented Women’s Voices Scholarship. 
The Curfew was the only Pakistani film that was screened at the Venice Film Festival this year. Previously, Saim Sadiq’s Darling screened and won Best Short Film at the Venice Film Festival in 2019.
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