Ramchand Pakistani opens today at cinemas all over pakistan. For Karachi, its nishant, ftc and cineplex. The film is directed by Mehreen Jabbar who happens to be my favorite. The cast includes Syed Fazal Hussain, Nandita Das, Rashid Faruqi, Navaid Jabbar, Maria Wasti, Noman Ijaz, Farooq Pareo, Zhalay Sarhadi and many others. The film has been to be Robert De Niro’s Tribeca Film Festival under competition section, also shown at Seattle International Film Fest and won an award at Osian Film Festival(India) so it is a must watch. I am planning to go today or tomorrow. Please support good cinema. Btw if you haven’t heard it’s soundtrack then you have missed alot so go and buy a cd.
About the film:
Ramchand Pakistani is derived from a true story concerning the accidental crossing of the Pakistan-Indian border during a period (June 2002) of extreme, war-like tension between the two countries by two members of a Pakistani Hindu family belonging to the ‘untouchable’ (Dalit) caste, and the extraordinary consequences of this unintended action upon the lives of a woman, a man, and their son.
The singular theme of the film is how a child from Pakistan aged eight years learns to cope with the trauma of forced separation from his mother while being held prisoner, along with his father in the jail of a country i.e. India, which is hostile to his own, while on the other side of the border, the wife-mother, devastated by their sudden disappearance builds a new chapter of her life, by her solitary struggle for sheer survival.
The film portrays the lives of a family that is at the bottom of a discriminatory religious ladder and an insensitive social system, which is nevertheless tolerant, inclusive and pluralist. The irony is compounded by the fact that such a family becomes hostage to the acrimonious political relationship between two neighbor-states poised on the brink of war.
More at: www.ramchandpakistani.com
