In Camera review – young actor faces endless auditions in disorienting industry satire

Nabhaan Rizwan is terrific as he faces the depressing realities and prejudices of trying to break into films in Naqqash Khalid’s brilliantly confident debut

A director is talking to a young British Asian actor. “You’re like the brown version of … what was his name again …?” By the end of the movie, this encounter feels familiar. We’ve watched the young actor grit his teeth through humiliating auditions. In Camera operates partly as a depressingly funny satire of box-ticking, quota-filling diversity in film and television, but with his brilliantly confident debut, film-maker Naqqash Khalid goes beyond exposing the stupid and cynical. With its dreamlike logic, looping around ideas and themes, In Camera is a disorientating film for disorienting times; opaque and enigmatic, scratching to get under the skin.

Newish-comer Nabhaan Rizwan is terrific as Aden, the actor trying to crack the industry. As a person, Aden seems lost. He’s clearly talented but he walks into auditions with a defeated air, like he knows he doesn’t have a hope in hell’s chance. Who could blame him? At one audition, up for the role of a hijacker, he’s asked to add an accent. What accent? “I don’t know, something Middle Eastern.” At another, he’s told they’re looking for “authentic Brown faces”. He seems most alive when a grieving woman hires him to play the part of her dead son popping round for dinner, a deeply unhealthy shot in the dark at healing.

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