Canadian filmmaker Fawzia Mirza views art as “an essential way of breaking down barriers, changing the world, and saving lives”. As a queer Muslim writer and director, she feels that making and sharing her art has saved her own life.
“We’re able to connect around the world with others who share our identities,” Mirza tells Pancouver by phone.
Her award-winning 2023 film, The Queen of My Dreams, is one of a growing number of productions centering queer Muslims. Other examples include Lee Nisar’s play Dil Ka and Bilal Baig’s CBC comedy series Sort Of.
Meanwhile, the U.K. TV show We Are Lady Parts and the presence of British-American fashion designer Tan France on Netflix’s Queer Eye are reshaping perceptions about LGBTQ+ Muslims.
Mirza looks upon all of this in nuanced ways. She’s happy that the world is finally seeing more queer Muslims on TV and movie screens.
“The expansion is emotional,” she says.
However, the filmmaker recognizes that this trend is connected to capitalism’s commodification of queer and trans people, as well as Muslim culture.
“It’s like, ‘Oh this sells, therefore we will buy it or sell it,’ ” Mirza observes. “It’s both sides of that: it’s good and it’s also part of capitalism.”
Moreover, she believes that queer and trans Muslim people will continue going in and out of fashion in the years to come.
“But we are here; we have been here; and we are not going to go anywhere,” Mirza declares. “My mission as an artist is to centre our joy and our hope and our love because we need to see it.”
Mirza will speak on EXNW panels
Mirza is one of the highlighted speakers at the upcoming EXNW (East by Northwest) conference from July 26 to 28 in Vancouver. The Racial Equity Screen Office is presenting the event in partnership with Gold House.
At 11:50 p.m. on July 27, Mirza will speak on a panel called “Breaking the Monolith – Identity, Nuance, Audience” at JW Parriott Parq Vancouver. She’ll be joined by Oscar-nominated documentarian Nisha Pahuja and Allegiance CBC TV show creator and writer Anar Ali. Knowledge Network board chair Satwinder Bains and International South Asian Film Festival producer Mannu Sandhu will also be on this panel.
This year, Pahuja was nominated for an Academy Award in the Documentary Feature Film category for To Kill a Tiger. It revealed how a community-based culture in the Indian state of Jharkhand impeded a family’s quest for justice following a gang rape.
Mirza praises Pahuja and others involved in the film for highlighting this issue.
“The best thing we can do in this business is to support each other and celebrate each other because oftentimes, those celebrations can feel few and far between,” Mirza says.
Then at 1:20 p.m. on July 27, Mirza will be on another panel called “Spotlighting Talent & Their Production Companies”. Mirza co-founded Baby Daal Productions with her wife, Andria Wilson Mirza. This session will address the importance of racialized people starting their own companies.
On this panel, she’ll be joined by Echelon Talent Management president Andrew Ooi, Racialized Equity Screen Office founder Barbara Lee, Actor Hudson Yang, and producers Jeff Yang and Brian Yang.
Sharmila Tagore film inspires Mirza
The origins of Mirza’s feature film, The Queen of My Dreams, go back more than a decade when she co-wrote and co-directed a short film with the same name. It re-imagined a 1969 Bollywood classic, Aradhana, with a queer twist.
“That was a very public conversation about a really private struggle,” Mirza says. “At the time, I wasn’t calling myself a filmmaker. I wasn’t making films. I was really just an actor trying to make some art about my struggle of trying to figure out if I could be queer and Muslim and love Bollywood romance at the same time.”
She loosely adapted the screenplay of the short film into a one-person play called Me, My Mom & Sharmila. “Sharmila” in the title refers to Bollywood legend Sharmila Tagore, who starred in Aradhana opposite Rajesh Khanna.
“I love storytelling about family and mothers—and our relationship to our past. And how it informs the present and can shift and change and better our futures,” Mirza states. “I think in order to be our best selves… you have to love how you got here.”
That, she suggests, comes from examining the past. Moreover, she says that these themes show up in all of her work.
“How do we become who we are?” Mirza asks. “Because as much as I think there’s this kind of western notion of the ‘I’—the independent ‘I’, the me, the bootstrap idea—we are not born alone.
“Nobody makes it alone,” she emphasizes. “We are all somebody of history, of ancestry, and we’re shaped by those experiences that are good or bad or traumatic or joyful.”
History informs identity
Mirza walks the talk in this regard. She’s highly conscious of her family history. Her mother was born in the Indian city of Kanpur; her dad was from Delhi. But when the British colonizers partitioned the subcontinent into the independent countries of India and Pakistan in 1947, it led to mass dislocation and widespread communal violence.
Muslim families like hers fled from India across the Radcliffe Line to Pakistan whereas Hindus and Sikhs crossed over to India in the opposite direction. Her mom was a baby at the time and her dad was 10 or 12 years old.
“I think my parents’ story is very similar to millions of people’s stories,” she says. “They ended up in the city of Karachi.”
Mirza was born in London, Ontario and studied English and political science as an undergraduate. She then graduated from law school in Chicago and worked as lawyer before switching to acting and then directing.
She’s maintained a strong interest in the history of her ancestral homeland. And Mirza is keenly aware of a recent deadly heat wave in Karachi, which sent thousands to hospitals and killed many others.
“I am in touch with folks out there—family and friends, obviously,” she says. “Climate change is real. It’s impacting everyone around the world in different ways.”
The Racial Equity Screen Office will present EXNW in partnership with Gold House from July 26 to 28 in Vancouver. For tickets and more information, visit EXNW.org. Learn more about Fawzia Mirza at FawziaMirza.com or @babydaalproductions on Instagram. Follow her on X @thefawz and Instagram @thefawz. Follow the Toronto Spark on X @TOSparkOfficial.
