A little garage with a big heart debuts Pakistan’s emerging filmmakers

Cinema 73, a community space in Karachi where friends, strangers and city sounds come together to celebrate cinema.

Cinema 73 is housed in a small garage, outside a home in Seaview Apartments. Though it is open, you feel incubated inside of it, held within the warm square of its projector light.

At a recent screening called ‘Short Stay,’ which featured short films by five emerging, independent filmmakers from Pakistan, some people crowded around the screen, on the floor, others took the half-dozen chairs while the rest stood at a slight distance from the movies’ shifting images.

Unlike a ‘real’ or traditional cinema setting, the focal point of such a screening is not a dominating display of the screen demanding all your attention or an ordered seating chart telling you exactly where to sit, but the way in which a community negotiates space, and unites in the congregational appreciation of locally-made art.

Motorcycles whir close by, generators are brought to life in the far-off distance and the wind carries the dim sounds of people chatting in a nearby park. Still, you are arrested by the images playing out in front of you.

The screening then, is not a refuge from the outside world as another theatre-going experience might be, but rather, is made by the larger world, and by one’s complete deference to it.

The graffiti on the cinema’s walls, the broken ceiling jutting out, the red and black sign out front: all of these things become a kind of container of life – both, the actual life transpiring around you and also the life that is reflected back to you in film.

Hemmed in by the intimacy of the space, you are still whisked away to other worlds, transported to the masculine office-space of Catfish (Abdullah Shahid and Zohaib Bilal), for example, the danger-laced universe of Sandstorm (Seemab Gul) and the urgent, cascading interior landscape present in Clayhorse (Abdullah Khan).

Life moves, changes shape, endlessly shifts and surprises on the cinema’s graffiti-splattered walls. The real and imagined are embroidered together—the final tapestry made even more alive by the Pakistan-specific sights and sounds the films themselves contain.

At this particular screening on Friday, February the 21st, we were also given small, white flashcards on which to write our thoughts, which the cinema’s overseers said they would scan and send to the filmmakers.

This introduced another layer of conversation—the possibility of a back-and-forth despite the filmmakers not being present in town, that further expanded the space’s small, cozy physicality.

Depending on where you sat—whether closer to the screen on the floor or outside so that the entryway itself became a screen, framing not only the films but their captive audience too, you had a different cinematic experience, a different ceiling at which to gaze. Sky spliced in with concrete. A stereo-speaker made almost invisible by the believability of film. Trees casting large shadows on the wall, engaged in their own little drama.

Anything and everything can be theatre, it all seemed to say, as long as there’s a willing audience for it.