Writer Bee Gul Believes ‘Intezar’ has a Global Appeal

A week has passed since Sakina Samo unveiled the poster of her debut directorial feature, “Intezar”. The poster features two people, one standing upright and the other sitting in a wheelchair, standing on a dock, looking out across the horizon of a massive lake below a few wisps of cloud and a sunlit sky.

The tagline reads, “Between no longer and not yet.”

Pakistani Cinema caught up with Bee Gul, the film’s writer to find out more about the film and its place in the current zeitgeist of local cinema.

Bee Gul is no stranger to film scripting, having written for ‘Laloolal.com’, a film starring Faysal Qureshi as the titular Laloo. Her first scripting credit was a telefilm called ‘Kaun Qamar Aara’ which was also directed by Sakina Samo. Her first scripting credit definitely played a part in getting her the job for Intezar.

“Sakina chose me. She came to me with a vague idea, and slowly, but surely, a story began to form about a certain age group.”

Intezar, right from its poster, seems like a very personal story, just as Laloolal.com was. However, Bee Gul believes that Intezar has a much more global appeal and that audiences in Pakistan as well as abroad can relate to it.

“People all over the world have pretty much the same value systems. That’s what “Intezar” focuses on”

Though Sakina Samo hasn’t directed a commercial feature before, Bee Gul maintains that her ability to ‘read between the lines’ serves her well as a director, and that in fact, she had been waiting for the right opportunity to come along in order to venture in to film direction in the first place.

As for Bee Gul’s hopes for the film, she sounded cautiously optimistic. Films like “Cake” and “Laal Kabootar” have their audiences after all, however small. However, her reservations were less with the audiences and more with the distributors and producers.

“Producers prefer to make films filled with hardcore clichés and item songs rather than message driven stories. Distributors are also a huge part of the problem since they choose to allot screens to these same films.”

According to Bee Gul, distributors actively try to kill off films that are off the beaten path which is a sad state of affairs for an industry that has gone through a rebirth.