Amrit Kaur, Nimra Bucha, Hamza Haq, Uzma Beg
After the sudden death of her father (Hamza Haq), graduate student Azra (Amrit Kaur – The Sex Lives of College Girls) flies to her ancestral home in Pakistan to be reunited with her grieving mother Mariam (Nimra Bucha – Polite Society), with whom she has had a rocky relationship since she came out as a lesbian. Struggling to fit in with the stern Mariam’s image of the perfect daughter, Azra is transported – through Bollywood-inspired flashbacks – to 1960s Karachi, sparking a connection between her mother’s wild youth in a more permissive era of Pakistani life, and her own world in ’90s Canada, and boosted by their shared admiration for Bollywood star Sharmila Tagore.
Writer-director Fawzia Mirza’s bright, warm first feature follows a young Pakistani Canadian woman coming to terms with her upbringing and her familial past. Developed from Mirza’s 2012 short of the same name, The Queen of My Dreams explores the chasm between individual desires and cultural expectations. Fluidly and convincingly slipping between time periods, with cinematographer Matt Irwin gifting the 1969 sequences the vivid Technicolor of the era’s Bollywood cinema, it showcases a great dual performance from Kaur as both Azra and the younger Mariam, tracing the links between mother and daughter and showing us how Azra’s mother grew into the person she’s become.