September 4, 2025
ISLAMABAD – A Pakistani short film titled The Curfew will make its world premiere at the Venice Biennale tomorrow (September 4) as the only Pakistani selection at the festival this year.
The Venice Biennale or the Venice Film Festival as it is also called, is being held from August 27 till September 6. It’s considered one of the ‘big three’ film festivals alongside Cannes and Berlin. Pakistan made a splash in 2019 when Saim Sadiq’s film Darling won the Best Short Film Award at the biennale.
The Curfew is a 19-minute film written and directed by Shehrezad Maher. It stars Sathya Sridharan, Balinder Johal, Sara Haider, Rajesh Bose, Chris Thorn and Salwa Khan.
The film follows the story of Ayaan, who becomes a temporary caregiver for his grandmother, following which they find themselves adrift in the gulf of a language barrier. In the silence, spectres of a colonial past shift how he sees strangers and himself.
Maher spoke to Images about her film, what inspired it and how fellow Pakistanis can watch it.
What inspired The Curfew?
SM: A 1919 photograph of an Indian man crawling at the feet of three British soldiers, a shifting understanding of my upbringing in Karachi where British supremacy was drilled into our brains at school and at home, caregiving for family I’m not close with, being repeatedly mistaken as service staff in stores in a New York neighbourhood, thinking about how the fumes of colonialism linger long after empire ends — shaping what we carry with us, even when the “homeland” is a glitchy diasporic hologram of other people’s stories.
Filmmaker Shehrezad Maher. PHOTO: COURTESY OF NEIL SANTOS/DAWN
According to your director’s statement for the Venice Biennale: The Curfew explores how colonial legacies mutate across generations and geographies — how a distant, inherited past can quietly infiltrate the rhythms of a life built elsewhere. How do you feel colonial legacies and inherited pasts affect the way young people view the world? How is that different from the way the previous generation viewed the world?
SM: I’m hesitant to speak for how whole generations view the world, especially on a subject as painful and varied as colonial legacies. But in the small scope of the film, Ayaan, a Pakistani American who hasn’t thought deeply about his family history, is suddenly tasked with caring for Nayyer, his Pakistani grandmother. The two characters are isolated by a language barrier, and Nayyer is feeling vulnerable and withdrawn after a recent stroke.
When memories of a colonial-era punishment grip Nayyer’s dreams and cause her to sleepwalk, her charged presence within the sterile walls of Ayaan’s glossy new apartment erodes Ayaan’s studied apathy toward his identity and family history. Online and offline, Ayaan’s interactions with strangers feel too close for comfort to the histories surfacing in Nayyer’s dreams. When strangers misread him as a food delivery guy or neighbours start to police other neighbours, the lobby and the hallways of his new building become rife with power dynamics he might have previously brushed off. Innocuous on the surface, the encounters suggest how deeply internalised feelings of inferiority and classism, which were tools for British colonial oppression, don’t evaporate upon coming to the West; they get funnelled into a different racist system.
As Ayaan’s discovery and Nayyer’s repression of a heavy family history surface, their relationship to the past is mirrored by their relationship to Urdu — Nayyer, through speech therapy sessions, is relearning a language she’s forgotten, while Ayaan, in his somewhat doomed attempt to quickly learn Urdu, is discovering a language he’s never known.
Tell us about the cast of The Curfew, specifically fellow Pakistani Sara Haider, and what it was like working with them.
SM: The cast was led by the brilliant Sathya Sridharan and veteran Canadian actor Balinder Johal, known for her work in Deepa Mehta’s films.
As Ayaan feels isolated and out of his depth as a temporary caregiver, he leans on Zaynab (played by Sara), his older sister and Nayyer’s primary caregiver. Since this was an off-screen role and the film features phone calls between the siblings, we needed an especially strong actor who could conjure whole worlds and complex family dynamics through voice alone. And Sara did that brilliantly.
With teasing humour and playful mockery, she perfectly embodied the practicality and impatience of an older sibling who’s had to take on disproportionate responsibilities in the family. Sara was on live phone calls with Sathya on set, which added so much texture to their sibling chemistry. As an actor, she plays and improvises in ways that make each take so unique. As a team member, she’s an incredibly funny person and brings a lightness on set, which I value so much.
How did growing up in Karachi impact the way you tell stories?
SM: Growing up in Karachi, where reality often felt more absurd than fiction, instilled a dark sense of humor that sometimes surfaces in my work. It also sharpened my curiosity for the surreal, the uncanny, and the unknown hiding in plain sight. Making art or film when there aren’t traditionally organised structures and resources in place requires inventiveness, playfulness, and patience — skills that have expanded my comfort with creative and personal risk-taking
My upbringing also made me restless to explore the enduring effects of British colonialism on a people’s processing of memory and trauma, which happens to be an important framework for this film.
PHOTO: FAE PICTURES/DAWN
How would you describe the feeling of being the only Pakistani to have their film shown at the Venice Biennale this year?
SM: Although this is a new trend, I’m one of three Pakistanis whose shorts have premiered at Venice in the last few years, which is promising for how small their shorts programme is and how small our country is. So, at least in this context and forum, I’m proud to be from Pakistan, but not thinking of my presence in terms of a precedent of scarcity that needs to be corrected or singularly celebrated.
What do you hope people take away from your film?
SM: It’s very gratifying when a film can give form to previously unnamed emotions or thoughts. But after setting the tone of the film, I find the uncertainty of what people take away to be exciting. I’m also interested in ways confusion and mystery can be productive undercurrents in a film — when every meaning, metaphor, and scene isn’t portioned out and ready to be metabolised, what are the moments, feelings, or ideas that stick with you in all their strangeness? Can ideas or feelings be appreciated in their more mysterious forms when they haven’t reached full articulation but are worth turning over, carrying around, falling asleep to, and sometimes tickling?
How can people in Pakistan watch The Curfew?
SM: Once the film gets distribution, it’ll be available online. We’ve just started our festival run, so there’s always the possibility of showing it at film festivals at home.