Student productions tackling the social taboos surrounding platonic male-female relationships, suicide bombing and sectarian violence were played on the opening day of the Tenth Rafi Peer Youth Festival at the Alhamra Performing Arts Centre in Gaddafi Stadium on Tuesday.
Milay Hum Kuchh Iss Tarha is a short film about a student at the National College of Arts who faces a common problem for students moving into hostels around the world: she can’t stand her college roommate.
So, she decides to move out of the hostel and into an apartment with a boy.
The film by Art Work Productions focuses on how the new roommates adjust to each other and the accompanying social disapproval of their situation, even though it is platonic. Their relationship eventually settles into equilibrium, but not before some entertaining ups and downs.
Khurram Aleem Khan, director and lead actor, said the film explored social issues that people in Pakistani society were still uncomfortable talking about.
“We chose this issue because it happens across the country every day,” he said. “We want to push people into a position of discomfort, to help them understand that social taboos against people living together as friends don’t make sense .... it is not a social crime.”
Allama Iqbal Medical College student also presented a short movie, this one on the topic of suicide bombing.
The film shows how a would-be bomber is brainwashed to act upon a certain agenda, only to find out that the values he might kill himself for are not a part of that agenda.
Students from the Salamat International Campus for Advance Studies (SICAS) presented a mime on the Sunni-Shia conflict.
The mime and special effects lent a new and entertaining twist to a familiar subject, but the combat scenes could have been done much better.
A team from City School Model Town campus put on a disappointing rendition of Chicken Little in shadow puppetry.
Published in The Express Tribune, October 12th, 2011.
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