Lali

A bullet grazes the shin of matriarch Sohni Ammi (Farazeh Syed) at her beloved son’s wedding. It was a celebratory bullet; shooting guns into the air replaces fireworks in this part of provincial Pakistan. Even though Sohni Ammi just needed stitches, the groom’s family blamed the freak mishap on the ongoing curse of Zeba, the bride (Mamya Shajaffar), whose previous two marriages never materialized because the grooms-to-be died under mysterious circumstances. Her last fiancé was stung by a scorpion when the couple was making out on a dune, Zeba would later admit to her new husband, Sajawal (Channan Hanif), who seethes under his own shame in Sarmad Sultan Khoosat’s feature Lali, Pakistan’s first all-local production to premiere at the Berlinale.
An entirely original supernatural-horror ballad of a cursed bride and a cursed groom, woven from old wives tales (it’s inspired by a short story written by Khoosat’s aunt) and obliquely critical of Pakistan’s accursed sociocultural legacies, Lali is one of the most exciting genre films to emerge from the South Asian subcontinent this decade. From costumes to make-up and production design, you could even define the film’s aesthetic as South Asian gothic; its mushaira (symposium) of colors is burnished into my brain. 
Tripling as a black comedy and a concert of folk songs, Lali is sharper and brighter because Khoosat avoids obvious routes and caricatures. It features a refreshingly loving relationship between mother- and daughter-in-law, and a queer gaze via the casting (here, even the milkman is homoerotically hot). Khoosat—who was a producer on Saim Sadiq’s Queer Palm–winning Joyland (2022), with Sadiq now working as an editor on this film—explores lust, death, grief, and loathing with a rawness bedecked with reds and purples, and with jinns, shawls, hawks, and ominous neighborly mutterings rounding out the diorama of inheritances.
I spoke to Khoosat, vivacious and eloquent despite his jet lag, a couple of days before the film’s premiere in Berlin’s Panorama section. This interview has been edited for clarity.
Editor’s note: the following interview contains spoilers. 
Filmmaker: The beginning of the film has so much comedy, drama and song, and yet you do a great job of reminding us that this is also in some ways a horror movie. I think of the shot that transitions us from Chapter I to Chapter II, where Sajawal is wrapped like a jinn around Zeba as she rides the bike in the desert with a score of strings. Can you talk about how you built-up genre [elements] in Lali?
Khoosat: I took a lot of burden initially and then I stopped taking it. [Initially] I was making sure that the fusion was very conscientiously done. Draft after draft I was figuring out how to segue from this tone—not just shift, but almost flip.

The initial scratch was the last bit, Chapter 5, which is the short story [“Kaala Kambal,” or “Black Shawl,” on which the film is based.] When I started working on turning it into a full-blown screenplay, it just kept becoming darker and more eerie. The cracking up of the whole thing happened when I was like, “No, this does not need to be this [dark] in the first two acts.” I clearly remember that in the first two drafts, it wasn’t a dark comedy. Live singing and comedy were two things which opened the universe for me. Then came the big burden of fusing them. I had sleepless months about it. Then I was like, “No, it doesn’t matter.” So there’s a fragmented feel [to the film].
On paper, the film was more from Sajawal’s POV. In execution, it has now become more Zeba’s. That balance had to be found, and a lot of it came through some interesting editing that Saim brought in. For example, the chapters were not there initially. [Saim put the] title of the film at the 25-minute mark. I was like, “Saim, sure, badass enough.” I showed a version of the film to our executive producer Apoorva Charan, and she said, “Sarmad, this might come with the fear that people think it’s a very long film if the opening title comes at the 25-minute mark. Is it another four hours from here?” [Laughs.] That’s when the chapter idea came to me. I thought maybe this might just help with easing some of those drastic tonal shifts throughout the film, because they do come without a warning.
Filmmaker: From the very start of Lali, I found myself asking, “Why is Sajawal so angry?” Of course, the film answers this question as it goes along, but I would love to hear your take.
Khoosat: Some of the reasons for his anger are very obvious, right? His physical scar is not internal. Coming from a culture where appearances are so talked about—from poetry to painting, there’s always this unnatural, unrealistic celebration of physical beauty—Sajawal grew up with a big birthmark on his face. 
But for me, the core would be the complex relationship between him and his mother Sohni Ammi, because the mother has another unresolved past story which she has a scar about. Now she has embodied this funny, musical, nurturing woman’s role and she has kind of buried [the past] somewhere. So it’s about Sajawal dealing with a very alpha woman, his mother. 
Then you look at the sister, whose presence is very vocal. Then Zeba comes into his life. Zeba is like a variation of Sohni Ammi in so many ways, but she comes with this big disadvantage that Sajawal could have taken a big advantage of, which he misses initially. So Sajawal for me is very complex, but also like any one of us as we meander through life.
Filmmaker: Speaking of Sohni Ammi and Zeba, in Lali we have a very different mother-in-law/daughter-in-law relationship, given the stereotype of built-in animosity. 

Khoosat: Yes, I’m done with the animosity-based mother-in-law/daughter-in-law thing. In our part of the world, I think usually a daughter-in-law is foremost a trophy for the parents. Sohni Ammi, who knows how troubled her son is, now gets this stunning girl with a disadvantage, which is a reputation [of being cursed]. But it’s almost like she wants to live her life all over again through Zeba. So I feel that it was always meant to be a very friendly, warm relationship. 
Regarding the whole idea of a curse, we did not want it to be too fable-esque. I mean, I do want [the film] to have a very vignetted existence of a fable, because there is the desert, the scorpion—the legend of it all. But yeah, Sohni Ammi is a very emancipated woman of today. Quoting her own line, she says we are in the age of the internet and we don’t need to think of [things like curses]. At the same time, she is a believable character who has her own superstitions. She is committed to the tree in the courtyard. She believes that the turban has to be returned to the shrine. 
As a filmmaker, I didn’t want to commit to the idea that everything needs to fall into a cause-effect [pattern]. Everything does not need to make sense as a complete threaded reality. 
Filmmaker: At any point in the writing process, did you toy with the idea of Sohni Ammi passing away later than she does?
Khoosat: She was meant to die a little later. But [her dying when she does] is Saim Sadiq’s brutal editing [laughs]. There is a sequence that has been chucked out. She could have stayed for at least a few more minutes on screen. But then I agreed with what Saim was doing. 
Filmmaker: The aspect of the film that stays with me the most is its color palette. Could you pick a scene and break down the contributions of various departments to achieve color in a way that you enjoyed?
Khoosat: On paper, some of the colors were already there. There was a very clear mood board at least. Red and purple are not my favorite colors at all. But the idea of this family of colors came with the story. This film starts with a shaadi [wedding], and shaadi is always red, for us at least. The birthmark/scar on Sajawal’s face is lali [red], and even that goes from red to purple in various moments of the film. So purple and red were already there.

Then I had a fantastic team, from the production designer to the art director to the costume people. Just for a couple of scenes, I had sort of prescribed what I wanted, but then everybody started bringing in their interpretations. The cinematographer, his only thing was he wanted darker walls. No DP wants white or light colored walls. Then I have a brilliant colorist (Fatimah Sattar). Red is a tricky color to handle. It bleeds too quickly. It can really jump at you. It’s tough to handle in post.
In the film, the color of the blanket is borrowed from a story which is called “Kaala Kambal,” which means ‘black shawl’. That was the first thing that I changed. In most government-run hospitals [in Pakistan], for the longest time that I can remember, there’s always a red blanket. A dirty white sheet which looks sick, and always a red blanket. I’ve never understood the reason for it. Maybe it was a big donation that came from the Red Cross? 
I would want to psychoanalyze myself [about this] one day but for the long bit where Sohni Ammi tells her life story to Zeba, I just wanted a purple outfit for Zeba. From day one, we just wrote it. Why, I don’t know. The jamuns [java plum fruit] of the tree in the courtyard are purple. There’s some association I have to unlock. 
[Later in the film], we start depleting the colors, but the hue stays. Like during that song that Zeba sings at the grave, she’s wearing purple again. The red stays through the henna on her hands. Then the big red thing comes in the end. All this is crafted with care by the lovely team.
Filmmaker: What is an example of a strong choice that you had to make in the color grading?
Khoosat: I wanted [the grade] to be more bizarre initially, if I can be honest. Somehow I thought that the situations are ordinary, so we want something not ordinary. We tried a few things but then it just started looking too outlandish. Punjabi setting wise, I wanted it to look authentic enough. [These spaces are] usually very cluttered. My sister (Kanwal Khoosat) is the production designer, she’s very fond of tiny little things. I would [sometimes] be sad or angry about it. I would say, “Why did you put that detail there? I can’t really take a close-up of it now!” Like things in the cupboards. Or [the fact that Sajawal] is a welder, how much she fought with me to bring that big headboard in the bedroom. She’s like, “He’s a welder. He plays with stuff.”
With the color palette, we tried making it more pushy, but then we started bringing it back to normal. With the mood, the film gets bleaker. With the desert, for example, we’ve always seen a desert which is really warm, sunny and more in the browns, but this is where we brought in a bit of green and gray. 

A version of the film in my head was a little more experimental, a little more in the world of Lanthimos, but then I was like, “No, we need to still keep it believable enough, true to the setting.” This is actually the warmest film that I have made in terms of the color. That came with red. As the film breathed, we started taming it more. It was a lot more untamed on paper. 
Filmmaker: I have to confess that the one character that I did not fully get but I was very interested in is Bholi, played by Rasti Farooq. As a nonverbal character, I felt I didn’t know how to decode her all the time. Her contribution in the last act was more clear to me. How did you conceive of this character? Is she more than just a witness?
Khoosat: She’s definitely more than just a witness. I knew a Bholi, for starters. She lived on the same street when I was growing up. Just like the tree in the courtyard or the color purple, I knew a Bholi had to exist somewhere in the film. Bholi and Sajawal are this joint thing for me. She is someone who perhaps is as old as Sajawal. They must have grown up together. There’s a lot that Sajawal, I feel, admires about her, the kind of freedom that she has. Particularly for me, in order to justify the last act, Sajawal needed to have been exposed to a Bholi in his life. Her big howl is when he almost gets a flash of, “This is what I’ve been holding back.” 
So Bholi for me is a very important punctuation throughout the film. She has a very dynamic arc, from nonverbal to something big. And she’s giving you premonitions throughout. For me to justify the universe of Lali, where you would be just thrown into a [new] tonal reality, you do need a Bholi somewhere. You do need her playing with the empty cola bottles. You do need her banging her head in the hospital.
Also, on paper, Bholi was a little more present. The fear was that she should not become a decorative idea. But then in the final draft, some characters [were less foregrounded]. In the edited version, she might give you an impression in terms of screen time that she just comes in and goes but I would like to believe that if one were to just plot her reactions through the film there is a very clear and important arc to Bholi.
Filmmaker: I have to ask about the shape of Sajawal’s scar. How did you come up with it? 
Khoosat: It was a tough challenge, to be honest. Of course you can’t be stenciling it in. It had to be painted everyday. But we did a lot of research and a lot of these marks can have very interesting, sharp edges to them. For this particular one we had an almost exact reference. For the longest time I had a problem with some of the sharpness. But then the more we smoothed around the edges, the more unbelievable it became. It started looking like a bad rosacea. So [we tried] a very defined scar. Small detail: it has that beaky kind of edge to it from the bird that Sajawal keeps; we were being theatrical with it! 

But the scar was one of my biggest fears. Would it stop jumping at the audience? With my first focus group I kept asking everyone, “When do you stop thinking about it?” Because of course you know that it is a cosmetic thing or a make-up thing. Thankfully, most of [the focus group] said it stops jumping out. [At the same time] that it stops mattering somehow is a bit of a disadvantage. Zeba’s scar is her reputation, her bad luck [that she brings]. Sajawal’s scar is very obvious and present, and somehow the presence is gone after a while. I would have liked it to matter a little bit more.