I am a filmmaker and screenwriter interested in how cinema can interrogate ideological structures while experimenting with form. My work often engages with contested histories, erasures, and the paradoxes that exist with Pakistan’s cultural production and distribution networks.

My screenplays include “Zindagi Tamasha” (2020), a film about blasphemy-related violence and queer masculinities that was banned in Pakistan for four years yet selected as the country’s official submission to the Academy Awards. This paradox reflects the tensions within Pakistan’s imagined national cinema, a recurring theme in my work. Similarly, “Gunjal” (2023) investigates the unresolved murder of child labor activist Iqbal Masih, whose global recognition stands in stark contrast to his erasure from Pakistan’s public memory.

Recently, my focus has shifted to short films exploring displacement, environmental rupture, and the afterlives of colonialism. “Republic of Wailing Trees” (2023)  and “The Mother, the Sons, and the Holy River” (in post-production)  examine how nationalist aspirations shape landscapes and identities, often at the cost of indigenous communities. My current work traces the River Sutlej as a site of loss and resistance, where memory collides with the politics of hydro-infrastructure and extraction. I am particularly drawn to cinema’s capacity to evoke what has been erased, whether through ghosts that can talk to film crew, fluid rhythms of oral storytelling or fractured timelines of history.