Anxious anti-heroics: Zinda Bhaag — The DVD review
Pakistani cinema is changing. As more and more filmmakers from the urban middle classes continue to extend the recent extraordinary revivalist run of Pakistani films, the scope of mediation and perceptions in this respect are broadening as well.
This was quite apparent in Farjad Nabi and Meenu Gaur’s Zinda Bhaag. Released in 2014, the film is now available on DVD.
Zinda Bhaag is very much part and parcel of the class make-up and social landscape of Pakistan’s new wave cinema, in which films play like stark art-house mediations on life but bear the soul of lively commercial cinema.
However, unlike their new wave contemporaries, directors Farjad Nabi and Meenu Gaur not only entrenched their film outside the confines of middle-class settings, but their main characters also come from lower-middle/working-class backgrounds.
The story is founded on the ubiquitous obsession of Pakistanis from these classes (especially from the Punjab) who illegally make their way into European countries for the purpose of earning a lot more money than they ever could in Pakistan.
The film follows the daily lives of a group of friends who hold low-paying jobs and dream of one day crossing into a European city to match the tales of financial glory they have been told about those ‘brave and clever ones’ from their area who managed to slip into Europe and were doing quite well.
The film also points out the dangers this practice constitutes: many young aspirants are caught and jailed in foreign countries, or die tragically while trying to enter an alien country as illegal immigrants.
A mosque in the congested residential area of Lahore where the film takes place is often heard announcing on the loudspeaker news of the deaths of young men who have died trying to slip into Europe.
But Zinda Bhaag is not a serious commentary on the perils of illegal immigration or the kind of desperation and obsession that makes so many Pakistanis take all kinds of dangerous routes and avenues to enter more prosperous countries.
Instead, it’s a black comedy, giving Farjad and Meenu enough space to deliver quick-fire jabs at certain incidents that take place around the characters’ everyday lives but are the complete opposite of the on-ground realities of the class to which they belong.