Fawzia Mirza and Amrit Kaur on The Queen of My Dreams: ‘People want to hear more queer Muslim stories’

Mirza’s feature debut may have started with a wish to better understand her conservative Pakistani mother, but the joy it finds as it hops from 90s Canada to 60s Karachi speaks to big questions about south Asian identities

‘I made the first iteration of The Queen of My Dreams before I even knew I was a film-maker,” says Fawzia Mirza of the many years it took to direct her wildly ambitious genre-hopping, time-travelling debut feature. It all began in 2006. She was working as an actor in Chicago, and coming out as queer. She kept “trying to reconcile being queer, being Muslim, and loving Bollywood romance”, a combination that struck her then as impossible. She started work on a video art piece that reflected on Bollywood classics through a queer perspective. A friend suggested they develop it into a short film.

“That was the beginning of my love affair with the film festival space,” she says over a video call from her study in Los Angeles, a busy bookshelf and the movie’s colourful poster in view. “I found this community that I didn’t even know existed. My voice mattered. People were like, ‘We want to hear more queer Muslim stories.’ And I hadn’t gotten that validation or acceptance anywhere else yet.” As for her doubts about whether she could be a queer Muslim Bollywood fan? Making that film “helped me see that the answer is yes. Of course I can be all this at once.”

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