ISAFF comes to Surrey with a lineup of South Asian creators

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The International South Asian Film Festival (ISAFF) is coming to Vancouver from Sept. 25 to 29 with a range of documentaries, short films, and features that celebrate diversity and inclusion through arts and culture. 

This year, the festival’s theme is “Crossroads,” featuring 19 world premieres. The lineup includes feature films like The Glassworker, Dear Jassi, and Gunjal, and shorts like It’s a Bold World, Odd One Out, and Raising Parents. The festival will also play series such as Get Up, Aisha, Not Your Butter Chicken, and Potluck Ladies – “101” among others. Documentaries playing at the festival include Agent of Happiness and Ray of Hope among others.  

Kwantlen Polytechnic University’s department of entertainment arts is a gold sponsor and community partner for the festival this year. 

The festival will start with a filmmaker welcome retreat on Sept. 25, followed by a “Purple Carpet Gala” on Sept. 26, and end with an awards ceremony at Landmark Cinemas in Guildford at 9:00 pm.

Featured in the 2024 official selection for the festival is the short film One Day directed by Yazmeen Kanji, which will play on the festival’s last day. 

The film features Indo-Caribbean teenager Adeela played by Rebecca Ablack from the Netflix show Ginny & Georgia. The protagonist daydreams as a way to seek her inner confidence and deal with anxiety. 

“She’s much more loud, outspoken, and dramatic in her daydreams,” Kanji says. “Throughout the film, you kind of see her go through small changes that eventually lead to her finally taking steps towards being the version of herself that she wants to be.”

Kanji says she is excited for her film’s screening at the festival since it’s “exactly the audience [she] created the film for.”

Having One Day selected for ISAFF is also special for Kanji as marginalized filmmakers often find it difficult to get accepted into festivals, which she speculates is because people don’t understand the context of the film and the vastness of the South Asian diaspora. 

“When they look at a South Asian person with a Caribbean accent, who’s Muslim, they’re … confused.”

Kanji hopes the audience takes away the message of trusting themselves and not being afraid of discovering who they are, taking chances, and facing their fears. 

Based on Kanji’s own and other South Asian women’s experience in high school, the film revolves around those who underwent isolation in predominantly white and upper-class spaces and finding balance between their home and school environments.

“It speaks to the isolation that you feel when you are one of the very few Muslim or South Asian people in a space, and what it feels like to be in that environment, but then also what it’s like to have challenges with your own immigrant or Caribbean families.”

During casting for the role of Adeela, Kanji wanted to find someone with youthful energy but also was mature enough to go through the emotional turmoil of the character. Kanjis says Ablack, who is Indo-Caribbean, auditioned for the role after she sent her a message on Instagram.

“No one else that came in to audition for Adeela could even touch the performance that she gave.”

Kanji says securing funding for the film was a difficult process. 

“The references were early 2000s Bollywood meets Clueless, and so many people didn’t really understand what that meant,” she says. 

Kanji says it took time to find the support she needed to make the film possible since she was trying to do something different with the film that didn’t fall into the mainstream. 

Empowering Muslim women narratives was the motivating force behind the film, she says.

“There is so much that is coming out about Muslim women within the mainstream Canadian and American spaces in film and T.V.,” she says. “It’s tough to actually feel seen in these representations of Muslim women in need of saving.”

Kanji says the stories portrayed on film and T.V. limit Muslim women’s narratives to “doom and gloom.” Women wearing hijabs are often depicted as being depressed on screen, she says, adding that Muslim women need to see more nuanced stories. 

As a director, Kanji says it is important for her to show other Brown and Muslim women in spaces of empowerment. 

“We need to see ourselves in positions of power and fun, reclaiming our narratives.”