A few months ago, a teaser for a television show, Raja London Ka, popped up in several WhatsApp groups that specifically included film journalists. It was an anomaly: a regular television serial for Express Entertainment that looked like a legitimate motion picture — that is, more legit than what we often have running in cinemas these days.

Given that it was a drama serial and not a movie — this writer stays away from television dramas — and given the fact that PR hyperbole is a familiar companion on slow news days, the natural instinct was to shrug, scroll away and store that fleeting memory for a rainy day.

It was anything but rainy when the time to fish out the memory came to pass a month or so later.

On the way to a dinner gathering at an actor friend’s house, producer Mehmat Faisal dropped a name that rang a vague bell: Fajr Raza. Mehmat was developing a motion picture starring Faysal Quraishi, who too had brought up Fajr’s name in a separate conversation not long before. This young director, Mehmat said, like Faysal, had a very cinematic way of working. The sceptic in this writer shrugged it off.

From underground music and sketching to commercials, film sets and hit television dramas, Fajr Raza has taken an unconventional route to directing. Now, as he navigates the constraints of Pakistani television, the young filmmaker is determined to make his mark — one carefully calculated cinematic strike at a time

Curiously, the words ‘cinematic’ and ‘Fajr Raza’ have been trending quite consistently across industry circles and on YouTube. The latter, surprisingly, has people talking about this young director, whose television work so far includes Aazmaish (2021), Burnes Road Ke Romeo Juliet (2024) and, more recently, the ongoing Raja London Ka.

He has also worked across documentaries and commercials, and assisted director Nabeel Qureshi on Na Maloom Afraad 2 (2017) and Quaid-i-Azam Zindabad (2022). There is clearly more to his story than the three television dramas that have brought him into wider view. But more on that later, as his route to directing has been anything but straightforward.

So, when the opportunity for an interview comes, I jump at it. During our conversation, I notice that Fajr is soft-spoken, almost understated. He is eager to talk about his work, but there is little of the self-importance one might expect from someone whose profile is growing so quickly.

More strikingly, he seems just as eager to listen and learn — curious about the conversation rather than simply waiting for his turn to speak. Perhaps that comes from having moved through so many different creative worlds himself.

He has a keen ear and an open mind about the intricacies of the industry, and seems more interested in understanding how things work than in making himself sound as though he has already figured them out. His interest does not just stem from the perspective of a director inching towards quality control, but from that of a producer who wants to have all the information handy to find ways out of tricky situations.

I lead with a particular question: how does one make stuff cinematic — especially on television, where a gazillion factors work against you?

I am trying to slowly break down the wall,” he says. “Meaning, if you can’t break the whole wall at once, slowly hit it with a hammer, one strike at a time.” It is an unusually practical philosophy for a young director whose instincts, by his own admission, can run towards scale.

Fajr’s answer, in a nutshell: “It’s instinctive.” He perhaps added a shrug that I could feel, but couldn’t see, as this conversation took place over the phone.

You see, Fajr was in his office, somewhere across the city. Meanwhile, I was circling a once-green park, torn and nearly abandoned by the KMC, filled with dust, homeless families and roaring children playing football without a care in the world. It was not the most cinematic of settings.

But the vibe actually resonated with the tone of Raja London Ka — an edgy romance drama between a Landa Bazaar roadside shop owner (Samar Jafri), a girl-next-door (Ameema Saleem Khan) and an up-and-coming ambitious politician (Zaviyar Naumaan Ijaz), which has been raking in both ratings and views on YouTube. The still-ongoing serial’s least watched episode has nearly four million views!

After seeing the first episode, one can see that Fajr has amplified the grit (and the filmic way of shooting) from his previous drama, Burnes Road Ke Romeo Juliet, produced by Fahad Mustafa and Dr Ali Kazmi, starring Hamza Sohail and Iqra Aziz.

It would be silly to think Fajr could have been anything but a director. Creativity had been part of his life long before filmmaking entered the picture: as a child, he sketched, took photographs, made sculptures and played music. He traces that creative impulse to his father, a town planner and draftsman, who was also a skilled freehand sketch artist and encouraged his son to pursue the arts, even if neither of them quite knew where that inclination might lead.

Fajr initially found his way into music, forming an underground band around 2002/2003, though his father was less enthusiastic about that particular endeavour. It was only after an accident interrupted his plans to study business in the UK that filmmaking emerged as a possibility. His sister suggested the Visual Studies programme at the University of Karachi, and Fajr was faced with an unusual choice: give up the bachelor’s degree he had already completed and start another four-year degree in film. He did.

After graduating, he began working across the industry — making documentaries, then producing and directing commercials, and eventually assisting Nabeel Qureshi on the aforementioned films.

“In a way, that is how I learned how cinema works because, on the big screen, you see a lot of mistakes, and even the smallest thing is visible in great detail. And then, when one steps into the world of commercials, one [realises] the finesse in lighting and art direction,” he explains.

“I have always been very into production design because I saw how involved Nabeel bhai used to be. So, I always try to take it [whatever I’ve been given to work with] a notch higher,” he adds.

The work is also a lot more personal than in advertising, he confesses.

“[Whatever you do in advertising], eventually it’s not your property,” he says. “It’s the brand’s product. Although things have gotten slightly more collaborative in the past few years, there is often a shot-to-shot dictation from brands and advertising companies.

“The freedom we get in narratives — even in dramas — we don’t get in commercials,” Fajr adds, despite the fact that the freedom comes with its own set of constrictions.

He admits that the assembly-line schedule of Pakistani television requires constant negotiation. The industry’s production target can demand 14 minutes of broadcast material from a single day of shooting. He was forcibly taught this the hard way by Fahad Mustafa, who, as the producer, strapped the training wheels on him by giving him the 50-episode television series Aazmaish (starring Kinza Hashmi and Fahad Sheikh) to direct back in 2021.

Fajr tells Icon that it is impractical to ignore this reality; he decides, shoot by shoot, where the actual margin exists in what he’s doing.

“I don’t let it overpower me that I have to get exactly these many minutes out today. In my last project, there were scenes that took an entire day to shoot. For almost 14-15 days, there were sequences where a whole day was spent on a single scene. I take a bit of a stand to not make everything overly mechanical — but only where there is a margin of freedom.”

Raja London Ka provides a working example — and despite what people think, it’s not just a matter of opening the lens to f/2 and letting the background dissolve into an expensive-looking out-of-focus blur. There are some things that maybe don’t register to the audience or aren’t very in-your-face, but there is work done behind them, he says.

Most of it has to do with visual and narrative contrast. For example, speaking about the show, he says he deliberately kept Raja’s world rooted in browns and grunge, making sure that when the film’s leading lady entered the market in white, she would immediately appear to be someone who did not belong there. The young politician’s home, meanwhile, carries a black-and-white visual tension that reflects the air of uncertainty surrounding the character.

“I wanted to create that aura of a politician’s arrival or a hero’s arrival [to establish the difference in their worlds] before we just went ahead through dialogue,” Fajr explains.

The important word there is before. Fajr always reads the script with the intention of crafting scenes that set up the characters before they start explaining themselves.

It is a deceptively simple demand, and one that exposes a longstanding weakness in Pakistani television writing. Too often, he says, the screenplay — which is never a part of the equation since it’s mostly just dialogues — becomes a set of instructions for characters to say what the audience already sees.

“Those scenes are often severely lacking. My take is that there are many things you can tell visually without speaking dialogue. So, I design around them from the start.”

The problem comes when that way of thinking collides with the writing process. “The resistance you get from writers when you want to change something becomes a frustrating ordeal,” Fajr laments.

There is a bigger issue underneath that frustration that is generally applicable to all productions in Pakistan. Television scripts are rarely shaped by a single writer and director working towards one visual idea. Before production, they pass through layers of scrutiny, with six or eight people weighing in on material that may have taken a writer months to develop.

On the flip side, a writing team made up of inexperienced writers might conjure scenes that may not fit the narrative’s trajectory. Often, these scenes would be forcibly imposed on the director just to extend the series’ length — especially if it has good ratings.

However, Fajr also sees the dilemma from a different perspective.

“If you do something in a set pattern for 10-15 years, it takes time to adapt,” he says. The newer writers, arriving with greater exposure to foreign content and a better understanding of screenwriting, have an opportunity to push against that pattern, he believes.

Fajr sees the same instinct in advertising, where he has worked both creatively and as a producer. Brands worry about what an audience will understand, what they might reject and, increasingly, how quickly backlash might arrive, so another familiar idea takes its place.

However, he is not particularly interested in pretending that this can all be fixed by making one rebellious film or one spectacular drama. His ambition is more incremental than that.

“I am trying to slowly break down the wall,” he says. “Meaning, if you can’t break the whole wall at once, slowly hit it with a hammer, one strike at a time.”

It is an unusually practical philosophy for a young director whose instincts, by his own admission, can run towards scale.

He has already learned the less glamorous side of filmmaking: commercials have budgets, narratives have schedules, investors need their money back, and ambitious ideas can die perfectly healthy deaths if nobody can afford to make them.

Case in point: a screenplay he was developing about Abdul Sattar Edhi around 2015-16. Fajr had met Edhi sahib’s son Faisal Edhi while Edhi sahib was still alive. The script reached the writing stage, but the magnitude of the story began to clash with the realities of production. At the time, he had little choice but to let go of that project. But rather than killing the ambition, that reality check became part of his education. An education that is still ongoing.

There is something revealing in the admission. Fajr is still young enough to be excited by the possibility of making something larger than what the system currently supports, and he is also experienced enough to understand that systems are not broken by enthusiasm alone.

For now, his method is incremental — winning little battles so that a bigger war is easier to fight. Today, that means finding the space in the script, finding the margin in the shooting day, and finding the visual idea before somebody explains it in dialogue… then, carefully, pushing against whatever wall happens to be in front of him, loosening a brick or chipping off a little hole.

Raja London Ka, only Fajr’s third serial so far, is but one strike. The next one — probably the feature film Mehmat told me about — presumably is already being lined up. If anything, it will definitely be “cinematic”.

The writer is an entertainment journalist and Icon’s primary film reviewer

Published in Dawn, ICON, August 16th, 2026