Communication is complex and so is the choice to either shun the rest of the world or let others in. This dilemma is transmuted from mother to daughter, between husband and wife, from a friend to another friend and within oneself. Pakistani-Canadian filmmaker Haya Waseem tackles this subject in her coming-of-age film “Quickening,”an entry to the Spring Showcase at the San Diego Asian Film Festival, with glorious elan.
“Quickening” is screening at the 11th Sdaff Spring Showcase
The movie places this quandary within the terpsichorean world of Sheila, a 19-year-old Pakistani-Canadian who is trying to wrest herself free from the control of “values” invoked by her mother. As her mother disallows her from going out with her friends and insists on continuing to pick her up from school, Sheila asserts herself and ventures to experience things young people normally go through, such as exploring sexuality and intimacy.
This results in consequences however,...
“Quickening” is screening at the 11th Sdaff Spring Showcase
The movie places this quandary within the terpsichorean world of Sheila, a 19-year-old Pakistani-Canadian who is trying to wrest herself free from the control of “values” invoked by her mother. As her mother disallows her from going out with her friends and insists on continuing to pick her up from school, Sheila asserts herself and ventures to experience things young people normally go through, such as exploring sexuality and intimacy.
This results in consequences however,...
- 4/26/2022
- by Purple Romero
- AsianMoviePulse
Just One Film is a series that recommends individual films from festivals around the world—the movies you otherwise might have missed that deserve to be discovered.The fall of “innocence” looms over girlhood, an hour of imminent despair. We arrive at the coming-of-age drama already well-versed in the limits she will encounter as she explores her sexuality: there are clashes and confrontations, frustration and discomfort. She may make questionable sexual decisions or very natural ones. She may have to abandon her own home to survive. Haya Waseem’s Quickening belongs more specifically to those films that account for the sexual awakening of Muslim girls, divided between family influence and Western mores. In just the last few years there has been Iram Haq’s What Will People Say (2017), Jinn (2018) by writer-director Nijla Mu’min, and Minhal Baig’s Hala (2019). Waseem’s debut feature departs from its more straightforward predecessors by...
- 12/22/2021
- MUBI
Writer-director Haya Waseem’s feature debut Quickening is not about a pregnancy. Knowing this is crucial enough that she opens the film with the definition of pseudocyesis—a false pregnancy wherein the woman experiences all symptoms of being pregnant without there ever being a fetus. Without it we would focus too much on what Sheila (Arooj Azeem) having a baby during her freshman year at college would mean for her future rather than accept it as the product of all the stress she’s endured from family, friends, romance, heartbreak, and just being a young woman of color trying to reconcile the demands of her cultural heritage against those of her Canadian home’s potential for independence outside it. Playing everything “safe” is no longer an option.
Not playing everything “safe” is terrifying, though. Waseem uses Sheila’s major in performing arts as a metaphor for her inability to fully let go of her upbringing,...
Not playing everything “safe” is terrifying, though. Waseem uses Sheila’s major in performing arts as a metaphor for her inability to fully let go of her upbringing,...
- 9/15/2021
- by Jared Mobarak
- The Film Stage
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