Charting a Bold Future For Pakistani Cinema

September 16, 2020

Published by Oxford University Press, Pakistan, in summer 2020, Love, War & Other Longings: Essays on Cinema in Pakistan, is a collection of essays edited by Vazira Zamindar, Associate Professor of History at Brown University and Asad Ali of Harvard University.  Love, War and Other Longings emerges from conversations at two Brown-Harvard Pakistani Film Festivals Vazira Zamindar co-organized in 2014 and 2015, when she ran the South Asia Program at Brown (2102-16). According to a review in Hyperallergic, the collection, "offers a thought-provoking analysis of the country’s lesser-known film history, while sketching out aspirations for the industry."  Read the full review here.

The collection asks: Has there been a 'revival' of Pakistani cinema? Or can the very question be put to scrutiny? Can we think beyond a national cinema, and instead simply think with films to explore the fraught politics and aspirations of our times? Love, War & Other Longings brings together historians, anthropologists, artists, and film-makers to offer new lines of enquiry that probe the tensions between cinema's past and present, absences and the archive, seduction and respectability, class and consumption, as well as genre and censorship. At times experimental in form, the essays seek to draw readers into conversations that engage political theory and postcolonial history, and become part of ongoing writing, thinking, and the making of films in Pakistan and the global south more broadly.