Years in the making, Fawzia Mirza’s debut feature mixes the personal with fantasy

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It’s hard to believe that The Queen of My Dreams is Canadian filmmaker Fawzia Mirza’s debut feature. A lush kaleidoscope of different eras, geographies and cultures, Mirza’s deeply intentional film follows Azra (The Sex Lives of College Girls’ Amrit Kaur), a queer Canadian grad student who, having only recently come out to her parents, now finds herself flying to her ancestral home of Pakistan following the sudden death of her father Hassan (Hamza Haq).

An energetic hybrid of coming-of-age film, comedy-drama and Bollywood fantasy, The Queen of My Dreams centres on the strained relationship between Azra and her mother Mariam (Ms. Marvel’s Nimra Bucha), their shared love for Bollywood star Sharmila Tagore, and the surprising parallels between the lives of mother and daughter across three decades. Taking place in the “present” of 1999 as well as 1980s Nova Scotia and 1960s Karachi, Mirza’s film feels borne of memory, fantasy and nostalgia, and displays a loving reverence for its cultural specificities and intergenerational narrative.

With this strong sense of consideration and purpose, it comes as no surprise that the story’s process of writing, rewriting and editing was undertaken over the course of years. The Queen of My Dreams began its creative life as a short film of the same name, co-written and co-directed with collaborator Ryan Logan and released in 2012; it was then adapted further by Mirza into the 2014-2016 run of her one-woman play titled Me, My Mom & Sharmila. Shortlisted for the Directors Guild of Canada’s 2023 Jean-Marc Vallée DGC Discovery Award and the recipient of five Canadian Screen Award nominations in 2024, the film has been met with acclaim from the industry following its world premiere at TIFF last year.

The self-described queer Muslim Pakistani filmmaker is quick to note the efforts of her first feature film’s collaborators. With help from wife and producer Andria Wilson (formerly the executive director of Toronto’s Inside Out), Canadian Screen Award-winning editor Simone Smith and Sort Of cinematographer Matt Irwin, The Queen of My Dreams is no doubt a shared effort. It’s the kind of film that is clearly indebted to a kind of collective dream-making deeply rooted in community.

Ahead of the film’s selection at TIFF’s Canada’s Top Ten earlier this year, The Globe and Mail sat down with Mirza to talk about the intersections between family, culture and identity in storytelling, as well as the role of creation as part of a process of healing.

So much of your film draws on collective cultural memory and history as well as a very personal kind of dreaming. Can you talk a bit about the film in terms of that kind of hybrid imagining?

I grew up in Sydney, Nova Scotia, watching Bollywood movies on VHS. My mom would go from Sydney to Halifax to visit the South Asian grocery store and buy lentils, rice, spices and Bollywood movies for us. Bollywood movies are fun and joyous – they’re six movies in one and six genres in one, all combining to make this whole new genre. They really informed who I am. As a Pisces, I am a hopeless romantic – I love love – and those stories love love too.

Part of that as well is the fantasy of relationships working out, of what a relationship between a mother and daughter could be, of a hopeful and joyous world. And all of that is part and parcel of the fantasy.

While the play was 99 per cent my life, the film is much less than that. As I was writing, rewriting and adapting, I realized there were parts of the story that I wanted to tell and there were some parts that I didn’t. And I didn’t have all of the information for the parts that I wanted to tell, so some of it is fantasy – what if there is this romance in the 1960s between someone like my father and someone like my mother? What might have happened? There are a lot of personal touchpoints and a lot of fantasy at the same time.

There are so many deeply lived tensions we witness in the film – I’m thinking, for example, the way that Azra’s grief and loss is really interrupted by these gendered rituals and traditions – that live so easily alongside the lightness and, a lot of time, winking humour of the film. Can you talk about how you worked to strike that balance?

My dad passed in a very similarly dramatic way. I was at home in North America and had to get an emergency visa and fly home to Pakistan the next day for the burial. There are parts of that experience that are deeply emotional and some of that is not in the film – it could have been a film that was much more full of grief. The film is drama and, as in Bollywood, there’s melodrama, but there could have been much more and I had to really practise restraint in that.

I’ve always survived through comedy. It’s also a way to show these little truths without having to overexplain them or without having them be what the scene or moment is fully about.

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Talk to me about how you built out the film’s visual world.

The visual aesthetic was really important to me. Building it began before we filmed and involved hiring a director of photography who was amazing at lighting and could bring a visual joy to the film, even amongst the loss that the character is experiencing. Our production designer, Michael Pierson, is incredible. Our Nova Scotia and Pakistani design teams were in constant conversation with one another. Everyone worked together to make this world full. My vision as a director is very much rooted in collaboration – I can be my best when I call others in. It was really important for me not to show a drab, grey, sad world, even in Nova Scotia. I didn’t want to give into that and I have seen that a lot; that’s not the movie I wanted to make.

There was a depth that you gave to the entire span of your characters and their stories. I think, especially in films focusing on queer racialized folks – especially South Asian stories – these kinds of stories can really cater to a really insidious type of Western gaze, sometimes unintentionally, and feel stunted. Can you talk a bit about giving over space to multiple ways of living?

If I made this movie 10 or 15 years ago, I imagine it would be a very different story. There is so much of the truth of the trauma, pain, struggle, sadness and abuse that is intentionally not in this movie. For me, as a queer Muslim woman and gender-expansive person, I don’t need to see more of that and I don’t need to make more of that. We live it; we experience it every single day. Part of my mission as a filmmaker is really centring hope, joy and possibility.

Part of my journey of self-love which, I think, is part of what’s in this film, has also been finding love and compassion for my mom. I’m not saying everyone can do that or feel safe to do that, but I definitely had to do that. Creating space to consider her and what someone like her – our mothers and their mothers – went through was a large part of that fantasy. I wanted to bring some sort of a hope to future relationships.

I know the kind of movies that I make and write and they’re not trauma porn. It is deeply intentional. When I was starting to create, there was nobody [for me] to look to for any sort of meaningful representation. We were very deeply in this post-9/11 world where Muslims were “terrorists” and Muslim women were “oppressed.” And I just don’t see the world that way.

You brought us back to 1960s Pakistan and highlighted the way that so many women and gender-expansive folks were living in this kind of defiant and loving way that I think, oftentimes, is erased from our idea of what the past is. What thoughts were underscoring the need for that kind of representation for you?

I was just obsessed with this story of 1960s Pakistan. I was obsessed with the idea of who my mom might have been then, with every auntie and uncle who lived then, and, of course, the land then. I love how the 1960s aspect has really resonated with people, especially as it was this universal, global time of transition. I’ve had people say to me “I didn’t know Pakistan was like that!” or “I didn’t know you guys listened to that kind of music!” We did!

For so many reasons in this moment that we’re in, in the world, we have to revisit the past and analyze the history of how we got here. We can’t erase it, we can’t let it be forgotten, we can’t let it be rewritten. We are all connected and that universal truth deeply shapes how I create and move through the world. I really do believe the past is part of our future, and if we don’t see that kind of representation, we can’t dream of a future that includes it.

This interview has been edited and condensed.