The Queen of my Dreams, Fawzia Mirza’s first feature, links two time lines and two continents with a mother and daughter’s shared love for Bollywood.
Finding Home
by Alexa DalbyThe Queen of my Dreams
3.0 out of 5.0 stars
CAUTION: Here be spoilers
Full of life, music and colour, The Queen of my Dreams weaves two stories of mother/daughter relationships together and two time lines – the 1990s and 1969 – linking them using clips of 1969 Bollywood epic Aradhana and its glamorous star Sharmila Tagore.
Azra (Amrit Kaur) is a Canadian Pakistani lesbian aspiring actress, who has a complicated relationship with her mother Mariam (Nimra Bucha). When her father dies suddenly on a holiday in Pakistan, Azra has to make her first trip there and confront her heritage and her relationship with her grieving mother.
In many ways, The Queen of my Dreams is typical second-generation Asian angst, written and directed by Pakistani Canadian Fawzia Mirza. The surprise factor is the recreation of Mariam’s (played by Amrit Kaur, a nice touch) life as a girl in Karachi in 1969 – a different world then of miniskirts, discos and freedom – but still the formality of arranged marriages. At times the film looks a bit like Pakistan for beginners but it’s fascinating to see something never shown before (1969) on screen for Westerners. 1947’s partition of India and Pakistan was still a scar that needed to be healed.
Azra and Mariam have always had a shared admiration for the star Sharmila Tagore and her films but, in Karachi for her father’s funeral, Azra comes to understand her mother better and why she has become as fervent a Muslim as she is now.
In the context of the generations of women in her family, Azra comes to see that when Mariam was a young girl, it was love at first sight with her future husband Hassan (Hamza Haq), the difficulty of moving with him to Canada away from their families and trying to fit in with Canadian life in Nova Scotia (the cringe-making Tupperware parties). Azra was brought up as a Canadian, with all that entails.
The Queen of my Dreams is a very enjoyable film that hides its depths, a very meaningful debut for its writer/director.
The Queen of my Dreams premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, screened at the BFI London Film Festival and is released on 13 September 2024 in the UK.
