A still from Anima State, Hamad Khan, 2013. [/caption]
Hammad Khan is clearly a filmmaker on a mission to deconstruct the very mindset of Pakistan itself. His critically acclaimed debut feature, Slackistan, was an exercise in confounding lazy clichés by shedding light on an underexposed minority: Pakistan’s privileged, Western-orientated and bored youth. Khan’s new film, Anima State represents a bold and seminal attempt to explore the violence and extremism that has come to dominate that country’s popular narrative.
“It’s weird out there right now,” admits London-based director Khan to The Majalla. “People are really angry and cynical. Film is still quite recent and new. I genuinely don’t think a film like this has ever been made before in Pakistan.”
Anima State is a surreal nightmare where a mysterious protagonist—his face hidden by mummy-like bandages—indulges in a brutal killing spree. During this bloody journey, nobody attempts to stop the character, and he seems free to continue indefinitely without fear of reprisal. At one point he even tries to give himself up, offering his story to an unimpressed TV chat show host, all to no avail. The message is clear: Extreme violence is no longer a big deal. It is not even newsworthy.
This laissez-faire attitude towards violence and security was witnessed many times by an incredulous Khan during the making of his movie in his home city of Islamabad. “We visited an army shop to buy a couple of items for the lead character,” recalls Khan. “I mean this was a proper army surplus store and the guy was like, ‘You can have whatever you want’. We could have walked out of there looking like the Chief of the Army with the full badges and paraphernalia. He didn’t once ask us for ID or anything like that.”
Two thirds of the way through Khan’s movie, and with something of a nod to David Lynch’s Lost Highway, the protagonist’s bandages disappear and he emerges, as if from a bad dream, as a completely different character. His gun is gone, replaced by a video camera. The killer has become a filmmaker. Tellingly, it is only at this point that things turn bad for him.
“When the character roams around with a gun, nobody cares, but when he has a camera it becomes a problem because he’s the wrong kind of individual,” Khan reflects. “This mirrors my own experiences shooting in Pakistan. Police are always harassing you. When you point a camera it does have its own power, and I was interested in exploring the power of shooting a camera compared to shooting a gun.”
The cinematography in Anima State is stunning. Khan talks with passion about the free-form, guerilla filmmaking process. “I had the whole film in my head. Every frame, every shot was already worked out. In fact, I didn’t even have a script, just a 30-page treatment, mainly comprising of images.”
Anima State is an experiment in form and structure, a fittingly logical response from a filmmaker confronting a society paralyzed by the absurd and the illogical.
“The war, the drones—it feeds extremist thinking. People worry if their neighbor is a spy or if a car in the street has American number plates. Meanwhile, Pakistan is like a Disney Land for terrorists.”
Khan is rather bleak about his country’s immediate prospects. “It doesn’t look good, as the doctor would say. If we’re a house, what kind of a house are we? What are the rules of the house for the kids? How do we treat the women? All of this stuff is very unclear to me. It’s a very long debate.”
Khan retains a dry sense of humor however and concludes with a cheerful reminder that Pakistan’s problems affect us all. He says: “Obviously, it’s also a very important debate because this house has a nuclear bomb in it!”
Anima State premiered this month at the South Asian International Film Festival in New York and is due to begin a festival run across Europe and the Middle East.
