On location in Scotland
The Castle, Des Pardes and Ansoo had also starred Zulfikar’s wife Tasmina Ahmed-Sheikh in the lead. Talking to me immediately after landing in Lahore from Scotland, Tasmina, who is also the producer of Sacch, tells me that her career was one of the main reasons why Zulfikar didn’t make a film earlier.
“We took a 10-year break because I was in politics [she is a member of the Scottish National Party], had won an election, became the first Pakistani Muslim woman from Scotland to be elected to any parliament and pursued a legal career.” She says that with Sacch, they want to put their best foot forward.
“He [Zulfikar] had a script that made sense to both of us, and that script wouldn’t have had justice done to it if it had been done for television. It is very much a silver screen script,” she says.
Making films in Pakistan is still a risk, I tell her — especially this year, when cinema and audience footfalls are at an all-time low.
“Every business is a risk, and film is just as much, even more so than anything else. [However], it’s a moral obligation for those in the industry who are able to [make a film to] do so, because Pakistani cinema has very much to offer to the world, and we can’t afford to have it lag behind other countries when we have so much talent here,” she says.
Does she miss acting, I ask.
“I don’t really miss it, because I’m doing so many other things, being a mum, politician, lawyer. [I feel that] acting is very similar in many ways to other professions — [in essence, it’s about one’s] ability to stand up, be confident and improvise.
“I do have a small role as the mum of the heroine, playing opposite Zulfikar, and I hope the public will enjoy seeing the husband and wife duo they know so well on-screen again, playing opposite each other. Hopefully, it’s a nice, quirky thing for the audience,” she says.
“All of our products have some moral line and principles running through them,” Tasmina says, moving on to another aspect of Sacch. “In this movie, it’s about the strength of women — of female empowerment, normalising the idea that women should be in leadership roles. We need to teach our young girls that the sky is the limit, and we need to teach our young boys that it’s very normal for girls to be in a position of power, and that it benefits society as a whole.”
Citing Sultana Siddiqui (CEO of Hum Network which is distributing the film), herself as producer, Haseena Moin as dialogue writer and Kumat Chaudhry as the screenplay writer, Tasmina says that the film is all about female empowerment, right down to its core.
However, she’s not trying to be preachy. Tasmina says that Sacch is the perfect end-of-the-year release. It is a family-friendly film that “allows family members, who are often busy in their jobs, an opportunity for an outing together. Sometimes the importance of doing things as a family is left behind [in these hectic days],” she says.
Sacch may very well be counted as a family outing — the film also stars Zulfikar and Tasmina’s daughter, Elysee Sheikh, as the lead of the film.
Looks, though, are deceiving, I’m told.
Zulfikar tells me that her daughter was recommended by Haseena Moin when she came over to pen the film’s dialogues. At that time, he had already entertained two other UK-based candidates for the main lead’s role.
Elysee, to whom Zulfikar had passed the phone on to when I spoke to him, tells me that she has a BSc degree in anatomy and MSc degree in microbiology. “My focus in research is to find new treatments to tackle the problem of antibiotic resistance within the next few decades,” she says.
However, despite her interest in academics, she also “really enjoyed dancing, singing and acting in school,” joining the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland where she studied acting and musical theatre for several years. She remembers being fascinated by actors and how they emoted when her father directed them. She was, she says, maybe six or seven years old at the time.