Slackistan

Direc­tor: Ham­mad Khan
Star­ring: Shah­baz Shi­gri, Aisha Lin­nea Akhtar, Ali Rehman Khan and Osman Khalid Butt

Slack­istan, dubbed as Pakistan’s first slack­er movie, is a low-bud­get inde­pen­dent flick with an edgy musi­cal sound­track (from local rap­per Adil Omar and punk-rock­ers The Kom­i­nas) which chron­i­cles the lives of Pakistan’s young and rich, and their search for mean­ing and moti­va­tion in their sleepy home­town of Islam­abad. Although the main pro­tag­o­nists of the film all hail from the ‘elite’ and are gen­er­al­ly dis­con­nect­ed from the wider tra­vails their coun­try is fac­ing, the ‘seri­ous’ issues – such as class and ter­ror­ism — very much form a back­drop to the lives of the char­ac­ters.

Despite their gen­er­al aim­less­ness how­ev­er, the nar­ra­tor Has­san (Shi­gri) and his friends are all like­able types. In par­tic­u­lar, Hassan’s friends, the smooth-talk­ing Sher­ry (Khan) and nice guy Saad (Butt), do a great job play­ing the role of dis­il­lu­sioned young men whose stag­nant lives revolve around mul­ti­ple rounds of cof­fee, cruis­ing around in their fathers’ cars and com­par­ing invi­ta­tions to wed­dings.

The movie has been crit­i­cized for fea­tur­ing such an inane top­ic when there is so much else going on in Pak­istan. But that hap­pens to be the beau­ty of this film: it presents a side of our coun­try that is rarely seen from the out­side. As the direc­tor Ham­mad Khan said at a recent film screen­ing in Lon­don, there are count­less top­ics in Pak­istan that deserve the atten­tion of its film­mak­ers, but in no way does this movie claim to rep­re­sent the whole sto­ry. In fact, no work of art can ever cap­ture all aspects of a sub­ject. Instead, this movie presents “one slice of the cake”, with its accu­rate por­tray­al of the lives of some priv­i­leged Pak­ista­nis.

But notwith­stand­ing the feed­back from this film, one can cer­tain­ly find great objec­tion to the deci­sion of our Cen­tral Board of Film Cen­sors (CBFC), which has blocked its release in Pak­istan. The long list of offi­cial rea­sons cit­ed for this deci­sion include the depic­tion of alco­hol in some scenes and the fact that the word ‘Tal­iban’ has been used in the film. The CBFC’s deci­sion reflects a sense of denial ‑as if hear­ing the word Tal­iban is some­thing extra­or­di­nary for the aver­age Pak­istani! — and hypocrisy, con­sid­er­ing the con­tent of the count­less Lol­ly­wood, Hol­ly­wood and Bol­ly­wood movies approved for cin­e­ma release with­out any cen­sor­ship at all.

Most view­ers of the film tes­ti­fy that it con­tains very lit­tle con­tro­ver­sial mate­r­i­al; the aver­age talk show in Pak­istan could fea­ture worse lan­guage and more sala­cious mate­r­i­al. Fur­ther­more, slap­ping arbi­trary bans on such inde­pen­dent projects serves to dis­heart­en those who to take on cre­ative pur­suits despite the lack of resources and sup­port avail­able in our coun­try.