Really everything you do learn from shooting a film you always learn more about your craft whether it’s acting, directing or writing. It gives you confidence as a film maker.

After learning a lot in my last three projects I posted blogs on each film and what I had learned from shooting that film. However the first real movie I shot was this one. This was the first ever screenplay I had wrote. It being my first screenplay is what had me pour all I had into this screenplay. My teacher was very impressed and I will say I was not pleased with how it had turned out as we had all shot it in one day and no planning because of the one week deadline given by our school. My screenplay was also cut in half due to the length and characters required for the film.

This project began when me and my partners sat down and brainstormed ideas and my partners came up with the idea of a girl being a victim of bullying however the idea was good but not intriguing enough. On my way back from school I had an idea of making the girl a victim of circumstances rather than bullying. I did this by building a narrative around a marginalized household in a patriarchal society not much different from small cities in Pakistan.

My favorite director/writer Christopher Nolan was my inspiration when I began writing as a child and that’s what I wanted to put in this screenplay and then direct it with the same vision I wrote it with.

As a director you don’t have to look at two dimensional spaces but rather look at the whole picture including the middle ground, background and the foreground. I also wanted to align the audience very closely to the point of view of the character in such a film. I wanted the actor to tell the story by there emotions rather than dialouges to bring out the brilliance in cinematography and the story. However I feel like I failed to achieve that as we did not have professional actors.

I wish I could have played the role of Anaya. The vision I had for this film was not how it turned out, but however I asked our editor Ariyana to re-edit the film and it turned out a little better and she did a pretty good job.

The idea of pursuit and the screenplay had me really excited as the story became really important to me. I hope maybe someday I can shoot this film again and do it better.

We also went to the extent of making our own camera tools and equipment by using home appliances.

The depth of the story went to the extent of using props, motifs for which were very important during the film. The denotation of the lipstick which represented who she always wanted to be when she grew up was one of the main scenes during the film. The use of other symbolic props such as the necklace showing the same girl grown up.

This film also comes to a complete circle by the end once the protagonist realizes that she lived under the roof of one man then another realizing that she was destined of much greater things om her own. Showing her as a victim of society and it’s norms and values.