Joyland was the first Pakistani film at Cannes, and it did not just attend: it won. Saim Sadiq’s debut feature premiered at the 75th Cannes Film Festival on 23 May 2022 in the Un Certain Regard section, and four days later it took home the section’s Jury Prize, an official festival award. For a national cinema that had never placed a film in the Cannes official selection in the festival’s first 74 editions, it remains the defining breakthrough, and the record at the heart of our Pakistan World Rankings and Records collection.
The first Pakistani film at Cannes: how the record happened
Cannes runs several strands. The Competition fights for the Palme d’Or; Un Certain Regard, its second strand, showcases distinctive voices and first or second features, judged by a separate jury. Joyland screened in Un Certain Regard and was also eligible for the Caméra d’Or, the prize for the best first feature across the festival. On 27 May 2022 the Un Certain Regard jury announced its awards, and Joyland won the Jury Prize, the section’s second highest honour. The film also received the Queer Palm during the festival. That second award needs a precise note, because the two are often listed as equals: the Queer Palm is an independent award, created in 2010 and presented by an outside organisation during Cannes for the best LGBTQ-themed film. It is not an official prize of the Cannes Film Festival. The Jury Prize is.
Photo: tangi_bertin via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0
The filmmaker: Saim Sadiq’s long road to the Croisette
Joyland was written and directed by Saim Sadiq, a Lahore-born filmmaker who studied in the United States and built his reputation in short films. His short Darling, also set in Lahore’s dance theatre world and also starring Alina Khan, had won the Best Short Film award in the Orizzonti section at the Venice Film Festival in 2019, an early sign of where his work was heading. Joyland took years to finance and shoot, and it carried a cast led by Ali Junejo as Haider, with Rasti Farooq, Alina Khan, Sarwat Gilani and Salmaan Peerzada. Its title comes from Joyland Park, the Lahore amusement park, a place the film uses as a symbol of the escape its characters crave.
The film itself
Set in inner-city Lahore, Joyland follows Haider, the younger son of a strict, wheelchair-using patriarch who heads a joint family and expects a grandson and obedience in equal measure. Unemployed and quietly miserable, Haider takes a job as a backing dancer at an erotic dance theatre, where he falls for Biba, the trans dancer who leads the troupe. Around that central thread, the film follows the whole household: Haider’s wife Mumtaz, who loves the job she is pressured to give up; his brother’s family; and the small negotiations of love, duty and desire inside one house. Critics at Cannes singled out its tenderness and its refusal to turn its characters into symbols, and the premiere ended in a sustained standing ovation.
How Un Certain Regard works
To understand why this was such a landmark, it helps to know the shape of Cannes. The festival’s official selection is led by the Competition, where around twenty films chase the Palme d’Or, but Un Certain Regard is no side room. It is a major official section in its own right, screening in the Salle Debussy, and its jury hands out its own set of prizes, including the Jury Prize that Joyland received. Films there are chosen for originality and for the strength of new voices, which is precisely what a debut feature from Lahore represented. For a first-time director, a premiere in this section, followed by a jury prize, is the kind of launch that most filmmakers anywhere in the world never get.
Alina Khan’s landmark performance
Much of the praise centred on Alina Khan, whose performance as Biba was singled out by reviewers across the festival coverage. Khan, a trans actress from Lahore, had first worked with Sadiq on his short film Darling, which won the Best Short prize at Venice in 2019, making its own piece of history there. Her casting in a leading role, in a film that treats her character’s inner life with complete seriousness, was itself part of what critics found notable about Joyland: the film’s empathy extends to everyone in it, from the patriarch desperate for a grandson to the daughter-in-law quietly determined to keep her job.
The awards trail after Cannes
- May 2022: Un Certain Regard Jury Prize at Cannes, plus the independent Queer Palm
- Late 2022: selected as Pakistan’s official submission for Best International Feature at the 95th Academy Awards
- December 2022: becomes the first Pakistani film ever to make the Oscars shortlist in the category
- March 2023: wins Best International Film at the Film Independent Spirit Awards in the United States
- 2023: Saim Sadiq named in Variety’s 10 Directors to Watch list
The Oscar shortlist run deserves its own emphasis. Pakistani films had been submitted before, but none had survived the cut to the 15-film shortlist from which the five nominees are chosen. Joyland did, taking a Pakistani story further into the awards season than any before it, a milestone that sits naturally alongside our coverage of Pakistan’s latest Oscar entry, the documentary Hanging by a Wire.
A difficult homecoming, and why the record stands
The film’s path in Pakistan was bumpier than its path abroad. It was cleared by the federal and provincial censor boards in August 2022, then briefly banned in November 2022, days before its planned domestic release, after complaints about its material. The decision was reviewed, the ban was lifted with cuts, and the film reached Pakistani cinemas in a censored version. Abroad, it played festivals on every continent and was released in cinemas across Europe and North America, distributed internationally to reviews most debut features never receive.
None of that changes the record itself, which is the reason for this article. Before May 2022, the Cannes official selection had run for three quarters of a century without a Pakistani film. Joyland, the first Pakistani film at Cannes, ended that wait not as a token entry but as a prize winner, in the same week it was honoured by an independent jury as well. Records in our World Ranking series are usually about sport or science; this one belongs to cinema, and to a first-time director from Lahore who took his city’s story to the most scrutinised red carpet in film and came home with its Jury Prize. The door Joyland opened is now part of Pakistani film history, and the wait is on for the second Pakistani film at Cannes to walk through it.
Sources
- Joyland (film), Wikipedia, with Cannes Film Festival and awards records
- Cannes UCR jury prize winner Joyland seals UK-Ireland deal, Screen Daily
- How Saim Sadiq and Joyland beat the censors in Pakistan, BFI Sight and Sound
- Photo: tangi_bertin via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.0
Umar is an engineer by profession and a passionate writer by passion. He has a deep interest in sharing good news related to Pakistan and has been working hard to promote the positive image of his homeland. Umar has written numerous articles on various topics related to Pakistan, such as technology, sports, culture, and economy.