In many ways, Saim’s journey to Cannes started long before the genesis of Joyland. The director’s fascination with films was apparent from a very young age. A three-year-old Saim would demand to be dropped off at his aunt’s house so he could watch Shri Devi’s Laadla on her VHS player. “Every day I would watch Laadla,” he laughs now, “It’s an obnoxiously bad film but it’s so entertaining and I loved Shri Devi, God bless her.”
This went on for months, Laadla eventually being replaced with other films, but always from Bollywood. “My parents would drop me to my aunt’s house and I would be totally fine, a three-year-old kid not caring at all where his parents were because I was watching Shri Devi and Anil Kapoor, or Shahrukh and Kajol.”
Bollywood remained Saim’s primary source of cinema for most of childhood, his “childhood love” as he calls it. With the advent of the internet and DVD technology, Saim says his “world opened up”. He began to read about films as voraciously as he watched them and this directed his attention towards international cinema like that from Sweden, Iran, and Poland. For teenaged Saim, films were gateways to different ideas and ways of living. “I also felt the most comfortable in my own skin while engaging with cinema,” says Saim, “Whether it was watching a movie, or reading about a movie, or writing about one. I was the happiest at that point.”
The filmmaker also had a knack for storytelling from a very young age. “I remember being a writer since I was a child,” he says, “it was inherent to me”. However, for a very long time he didn’t see how connected filmmaking and storytelling are. “Those things conflated for me much later in LUMS,” he remembers now, “Eventually I realized I can write, I’m interested in movies, and I can take pictures, and these things are connected so perhaps I’m meant to be making films.”
By this time, Saim was no stranger to the camera. His first video project had been a music video when he was in highschool and during his undergraduate year at LUMS, he worked on short films and documentaries. At the end of his four years at university, as Saim’s batchmates off to work at corporate jobs, Saim simply didn’t. Instead, he went to his parents that he had found a way to contact Sarmad Khoosat and would be working with him. At that point, all Saim knew of Sarmad was that he had made Humsafar, which his parents loved. The bluff eventually manifested into reality because Saim did find a way to contact Sarmad, who eventually brought him on as the assistant director on Mor Mahal.
Saim knew within his first day on Mor Mahal that he belongs on a film set. “I’m the happiest on a set,” he says, “I’m so comfortable. Things that I find difficult to do otherwise, if you ask me to do them on set, I’ll do them easily. I’m tired, I look terrible, I don’t eat well or sleep enough, but none of it matters because I enjoy it so much.”
On set, Saim also discovered a side of himself that he liked, “I became a nicer version of myself,” he reveals, “It was much more difficult to irritate me, I would not shout at people. I was the kind of AD who was nice but would get things done. I realized this is the best version of me, the person I am on a film set, so it made sense for me to do this with my life.”
It was while shooting for Mor Mahal that Saim was admitted for a Masters in Columbia University’s film program. Two weeks before filming for Mor Mahal wrapped, Saim was flying to New York to begin a formal education in filmmaking. The next few years were, “the best thing that ever happened to me,” he says.
It was during his time at Columbia that Saim first sat down to start giving form to an idea that had been swirling around in his brain, an idea that would eventually become Joyland.
