Joyland 15

"★★★★ – a delicate, intelligent and emotionally rich film" – Guardian

"An aching consideration of gender and sexuality" – Hollywood Reporter

★★★★ – The Upcoming

★★★★ – Time Out

Pakistan’s first official entry to Cannes (where it won the Queer Palm and Un Certain Regard Jury Prize) follows Haider, the youngest son in a patriarchal family who cares for his wheelchair-bound father who is desperate for a grandchild.

After Haider takes a job at a Bollywood-style burlesque theatre, he meets and falls in love with a beautiful trans performer. Joyland is brave, boundary-breaking filmmaking about identity and repressed desires.

Originally banned in Pakistan, the country then revoked the ban (excluding Punjab where the ban remains) after the film gained international and critical acclaim.

Our Tue 7 Mar, 7pm screening will be followed by a post-film discussion with Dr Dhiren Borisa.

Dr. Dhiren Borisa is a Dalit queer activist, poet and urban sexual geographer, and is currently employed as Assistant Professor at Jindal Global Law school, India. He is presently in the UK working on his first monograph as Urban Studies Foundation International fellow as a visiting researcher at University of Sheffield. He is also an honorary visiting fellow at the School of Geography, Geology, and Environment at the University of Leicester. His research primarily focuses in studying caste and class dynamics in sexual mappings and makings of cities from an intersectional and decolonial lens both among queer spaces in India and in diasporic queer worldings.