The first time I watched Zarrar Kahn’s feature debut In Flames, I sat huddled in front of my computer and forgot myself; I didn’t get up once in the film’s duration, sometimes I held my breath. The second time I watched it, it was to share it with my sister — this time, not so much so that she could forget herself in it, but so that she could see herself in it, for after my first viewing, I realized I fell so fully into it because it contained me, as it contains so many Pakistani girls. I watched it a third time, too, in a packed theatre, and felt it move through my body with the same force and urgency as it possessed during my first viewing. In Flames is alive.
It trails after Ramesha Nawal’s Mariam over the course of a few harrowing days as a preternatural, gossamery force closes in around her. In Karachi, Pakistan, Mariam is a medical school student in her mid-20s who, after first the death of her father, and then grandfather, finds her world, a frictionless existence alongside her mother and younger brother that custom (an unspoken cultural mandate demanding that the unpleasant — the past, feelings, desires, and ambitions, shame itself — be danced around, never spoken of) kept chugging along, is shaken by the appearance of a mysterious uncle who threatens to take Mariam’s family’s home. The uncle’s appearance drags hazy memories of Mariam’s past in its undertow, memories that puff up in her life at first unsettlingly, and then devastatingly. Through weighty horror — ghosts that rend the fabric of Mariam’s existence with the ferocity of zombies — and aching performances, In Flames presents us with a story of strength contained within mother-daughter relationships.
There is something so achingly perfect about the film. It’s not just Nawal’s delicately wrought protagonist, who holds up a much-needed mirror for a specific demographic of woman, a young Pakistani woman navigating her way in life as she hews close to obligations to her family, though Mariam as a character and Nawal’s performance could certainly be one of the film’s greatest achievements. But it’s also Mariam’s context: a choking patriarchy that begins the film as an ominous smolder, building up intensity around Mariam until it threatens to devour her in its perfidious flames.
In Flames is a visual, technical, and emotional triumph, but more than anything, it is incendiary for all the ways in which it delicately shows patriarchy that women contain a kind of strength that, like a garrulous wave, will never be suffocated.
Last year, during the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), I had the immense honour of speaking with Kahn and In Flames producer Anam Abbas about crafting such an inimitable and viscerally important film.
This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.
TAC: Where did the idea or the inspiration for In Flames come from?
Zarrar Kahn: In 2018, I made a short film called Dia, which was about a young woman and her secret boyfriend. And that film was originally written as a drama and it was my first short that traveled internationally and was really received. And after making that film, I developed a really close relationship with the performers, and I realized through the making of that film that I was also pulling a lot from my own life and the lives of the women that are really close to me. And [I realized] that there’s so much that I wasn’t able to tell in the short version. There’s so much, so many threads and themes, that I wasn’t able to explore just because of the medium of the short. And so I started developing it as a feature, but this time around with the intention of leaning into the horror of those experiences because part of my development as an artist was I was discovering: I was traveling across the world watching movies and seeing what kind of movies resonated with me, what films were resonating.
And there was something so exciting and interesting happening with genre filmmaking. I watched Titane at [TIFF’s] Midnight Madness a few years ago and [I remember] being in that theatre and that really visceral experience, and wanting to have those visceral moments in the project that I developed, but [to] have that come from the psychology of the characters, which is why I call In Flames a genre bender. It’s not just horror, it’s also coming of age. It’s also a romcom. It’s so many different things kind of smashed together to tell this very specific story about this mother and daughter.
I love that you bring up the topic of horror because that was my next question. [In Flames’ horror is] unlike anything I’ve ever seen. It’s so stark, but also poetic and subtle, and I think that that’s what makes it all the more terrifying. And so I wanted to ask, in addition to Titane, what are your influences for the visual and horrific language of the film?
ZK: I love Touki Bouki, it’s a Senegalese film. It’s not genre. Because Karachi itself hasn’t been captured on cinema much, I was having a hard time finding references for how I could shoot Karachi. And I remember seeing films from Dakar in Senegal, I saw Touki Bouki and I saw Hyenas. They are both these beautiful drama films that also have different [elements]: it’s a road trip movie, it’s also kind of scary, and [it was informative] seeing how they capture their city. And it’s also a Muslim city. And it just reminded me so much of Karachi. And then another film that really inspired me was The Big City by Satyajit Ray, which is a film about a woman who goes out and starts becoming the bread earner in her family and how that upsets their relationship dynamics. So that was another one. And then of course, Atlantics by Mati Diop was a big influence. It was also set in Dakar and has elements of ghosts and genre. [These are] references that aren’t just purely genre. Also Del Toro’s work — I love him, I love his cinema, I love what he does. I [had] a pretty eclectic Pinterest board from across the world to create this new language of what a ghost story from Karachi would look like.
I’m from Karachi and I want to ask, what was it like filming there in the heat and with all the people?
ZK: Anam, do you want to start that off?
Anam Abbas: The weather was okay.
ZK: We shot in winter because I shot in summer before, so I’m like, I’m never doing this again.
AA: But also everybody’s shooting, that’s when all the TV commercials are happening, whatever. And we were on a very indie budget, so just crewing up is always a challenge for indie films. But we had a group of people that we’ve been working with for a while and our associate producer, Carol Ann Noronha, [she’s] been working since she was 12 in the industry. So there was a lot of relationships of trust that kept this ship going. We were shooting through Covid, we were shooting on location and in places that were not used to — [it was] maybe the first time they’re being used as a film set.
ZK: Most of the locations [it was] the first time there.
AA: And very, very tight spaces because I mean, we were in these neighborhoods. We wanted to be authentic to the experience that we were telling. And so yeah, I think the biggest challenge was filming on location during Covid and we had a gazillion scheduling changes, but we made it through.
ZK: There was one location in particular that I loved but was such a nightmare to shoot in. It was the exterior of the apartment. Those almost prison-like apartment blocks in Johar, very much in the middle of the city. And I remember when [we were] location scouting, and I was like, we have to shoot here. This has to be the exterior because I feel like I’m trapped when I’m here. I can barely see the sky, I can just see wires. And these buildings are so ominous. And we did a four day spell and when we left it was like, thank God that’s over.
AA: It’s a 20-building complex and every night when we would wrap and we’d leave, I literally felt like I was stepping into another portal. It would be so visceral.
ZK: But at the same time that building, that complex, was so beautiful and had its own community. It had a little masjid and people were so friendly with each other and kids were free to run around. So it was a community, but it felt like a separate world. But I remember we all — when Mariam is on the bike and going to the beach, when she’s escaping, that’s exactly how we all felt when we weren’t shooting there anymore.
Literally one of my all time favourite shots is right after they go to the healer and Mariam, she’s still sitting in the room and you go through the window to look at her. It just almost moved me to tears. It’s so visually stunning — [looking from the outside, she’s alone,] she’s in this tiny little square, and it’s [breathtaking]. Thank you for bringing that up. So Zarrar, I know that this is your first feature. You work a lot in shorts, so [I was wondering] how is writing and directing a feature different [from the short], or did it produce any kind of different challenges or unique sets of obstacles?
ZK: I mean my collaborators say this: that all of my shorts really prepared me for my feature. You can see red herrings from all of my shorts in this movie. So I felt so prepared going into making In Flames because — for example, that shot that you really loved is in the short. It’s a shot by shot match. It’s the exact same shot in the short. So by the time In Flames came around, I wasn’t feeling like the overwhelming scale of this project. It just felt like — all the scenes on the beach, I had done a short film that was on the beach. The scene with the faith healer — I’d met faith healers before. I shot this really grandiose short film that was set in a disco in the 1970s of Karachi. So I’ve done big period pieces as well with big crowds. So that process really prepared me in making In Flames. What was really different was how long it was because when you’re making a short, maximum, you’re on set for five days. We did 26 days, I want to say 26, 25.
AA: 25, yeah.
That was different. It was like this is now just our whole life and we live in this movie and we’re doing 14 hour days. We go home, we sleep for six hours, we get up the next day, we’re back on set. So that took a different kind of sustainability, but I would love to do it all over again.
And writing it and fleshing out a feature, was that more fun, would you say?
ZK: I mean, I had a first draft that I threw in the trash, which is my process, which Anam is still coming to terms with. And then I rewrote that whole first draft. My process is really collaborative. I always say that your first draft is just you vomiting out all your ideas and then once you have them on paper, it’s subsequent drafts that will actually be the best of those initial ideas. And a lot of this story in particular is based on the real life experiences of the women that I know, and me as a writer, just pushing them into the supernatural, into horror, into really the psychology of what it feels like. And it came out of the writing really happening in the pandemic when the world was ending and everyone was being brutally honest. And also my relationships with my performers being pretty tight knit at that point, [they were being] collaborators and telling me about their experiences, being actresses in Pakistan, being mothers in Pakistan, being daughters in Pakistan, or just being an eldest daughter in general, which is a very universal experience I’ve seen. I’m the youngest brother, so you can see which character I am in [the film] pretty clearly. But wanting to use my tools as a writer to tell these stories — it was different, but it was different good.
I need to talk about Ramesha Nawal — how did you find her?
ZK: I need to talk about Ramesha Nawal! We all should be talking about Ramesha Nawal.
All the time! What was it like working with her to craft this amazing, amazing character?
ZK: A joy is the only way to say it. This was her first time on screen. This is her first time on film. She’s never been on camera before. And this was her first time on set. This was her first in every way. And she is such a gifted performer. She goes the extra length, working with her was a joy. There’s a lot of parallels in her own life with this character, so she was able to bring so much of that to this performance and her nuance and her delicacy and her vulnerability — it’s so rare and she already feels so developed as an actress in terms of the maturity of how she conveys those emotions. And I think that just comes from [the fact that] some people are gifted. I’ve worked with performers across all different age ranges, and I’ve worked with very senior performers who are also incredible, who can always find the right light. And another performer [in the film], Muhammad Ali Hashmi, I remember that scene when they’re in the rickshaw together, and watching them kind of just play off each other. And yeah, working with Ramisha, I’m just so excited to see what she does next. I think this is the first step in a very long and beautiful career.
