Inside Lali: Sarmad Sultan Khoosat On Love, Loss And The Absurdity Of Marriage

On a crisp autumn evening in Seattle, I found myself on a train heading south, on my way to a screening of Lali, the opening-night film at the 21st Tasveer Film Festival. Founded by Rita Meher and Farah Nousheen in 2002, Tasveer was established to champion nuanced, authentic South Asian storytelling and challenge the stereotypes that have long shaped its representation on screen.

Before the lights dimmed, filmmaker Sarmad Sultan Khoosat walked in, dressed in a kurta shalwar with a jamavar shawl draped around his shoulders. “Brace yourselves for a heady ride,” he warned us. Having deliberately avoided the trailer, I had little idea what awaited me, apart from a striking poster featuring a newlywed couple: a beautiful bride beside a groom whose face was concealed by a sehra.

My curiosity had initially been piqued by the film’s connection to Joyland (2022), the acclaimed Pakistani film directed by Saim Sadiq and produced by Khoosat. For Lali, Sadiq returns as editor, while Khoosat takes the director’s chair. The filmmaker is also known for the popular Pakistani television series Humsafar, starring Fawad Khan and Mahira Khan. But Lali, he admits, is perhaps his most personal work yet.

What followed was 116 minutes of gloriously unpredictable cinema, a heady mix of laughter, grief, fear, discomfort and absurdity. The audience responded just as enthusiastically, sometimes audibly, making the screening feel less like a conventional film viewing and more like a shared emotional experience.

Lali tells its story through a cast of vividly drawn characters, including the central couple Zeba and Sajjawal, prodded along by Shiv Kumar Batlavi’s poetry, stunning vistas of suburban Punjab, and enough twists and turns to keep you on the edge of your seat. The film first premiered in February 2022 as the first Pakistani production to be showcased at the Berlin Film Festival.

Watching such a distinctly South Asian story unfold in a Seattle cinema, surrounded by an audience of different nationalities and backgrounds, was a reminder of why these narratives matter. Their specificity is precisely what gives them the power to travel.

Following the screening, I sat down with Khoosat to discuss the film’s deeply personal origins, its visual world, the complexities of marriage and what Lali represents for contemporary Pakistani cinema.

ELLE: Lali is set in Sahiwal, Pakistan and carries a strong sense of place throughout: the sinewy gullies, the green fields, the patterned window grills, the weather-worn walls, the desert, the courtyards with jamun trees… How did you arrive at the setting of the film?

Sarmad Sultan Khoosat (SSK): I knew it had to be a Punjabi city, which is where the film originates from, where I originate from. Punjab, in general, has most of these textures like these kinds of houses, the narrow streets, this kind of architecture, jamun trees, mango trees, and these patterns on the window grills and all these textures on the wall. So Sahiwal by itself was a random choice. I just wanted to ensure it wasn’t set in a big city like, say, Lahore with identifiable monuments and buildings. And then, because there was a sequence where I needed the desert, we chose Chichawatni as the girl’s city. Between Chichawatni and Sahiwal, there is a stretch of desert.

ELLE: What would you say is at the heart of Lali?

SSK:Lali is about human relationships that we have the authority to manufacture ourselves, like a partnership, or union, or shaadi — whatever you want to call it. One of the basic requirements in our setting is to get into such a relationship beyond one’s own blood family and make it last. As a result, there is so much irresponsibility, many times leading to abuse in that dynamic.

Through this film, I explore my own complex experiences of family and the idea of two people living together, calling it a marriage. And people pretending to love one another, love itself being so complicated that it cannot be simplified into just a wow, or a commitment on paper. It comes with all kinds of horrors, traumas and all kinds of beautiful things too. Lali is an exploration of all of that.

ELLE: You dedicate the film to your mother, calling her your Soni Ammi. In what way has she inspired the character?

SSK: I’ve never dedicated any of my films or any work before this to anyone. But this is the most personal film I’ve made in terms of drawing from my own life. The things I’m trying to say are not essentially about her, but in so many ways, it is drawn from the collective experience of living in a family with her. The character of Soni Ammi has shades of my mother, who was very beautiful…very Soni. She was a very vibrant, very outspoken Punjabi woman who loved to sing, cook and feed people, who had this great sense of humour, this vivacious, lively spirit, loved dressing up and was into jewellery and all kinds of vain things. But then, again, if one’s bearing one’s own trauma, I was really young when she had a terrible stroke. And then suddenly after, from that big, tall human running around with all that energy she was forced into a horizontal existence, bedridden for most of her life after that. In some ways, it’s almost like a letter to her. As a filmmaker, you often keep going back to the same themes. I think mother as a phenomenon and my mother as a character, do feature in a lot of my work.

ELLE: The visuals — from the costumes to the art direction — are very striking. What was on your mood board?

SSK: It was a very weird mood board composed of references from painting, other films and images. I’ve had a saved folder on Instagram and Pinterest for years now. I also have a keen eye, plus a nose and ears too! So I would see things and take some quick shots: two people on a bike on a road, a particular tree or a little piece of architecture somewhere. This clutter was handed over to a bunch of really lovely, gifted people, beginning with the production designer, who also happens to be my sister — Kanwal.

We also had the art director Fyque and in costume, we had Zoya and Aisha. I remember that I kind of apologetically told the team that I’ve only ever made bleak, desaturated films before this. This is where we go vibrant. So we did just that. For instance, the short story Kaala Kambal, that the film is based on, features a blackblanket. But then we turned it into red.

ELLE: Death follows the characters everywhere, and a sense of anticipatory doom underlies the film throughout, even in its lighter moments. Where does this preoccupation with death come from?

SSK: I did witness my maternal grandfather dying, and I remember that funeral really well. And I was also that weird kid who was very fascinated with the coffin, because he died in another city, and his dead body had to be brought from Karachi to Lahore in a coffin. And usually in a Muslim burial, we don’t put people in coffins, but he had to be transported and the coffin somehow stayed in our house for months. It smelt of camphor which I became so accustomed to.

I also grew up in a house, for at least a few years of my early childhood, right next to a graveyard. So just the idea of the living and the dead kind of existing together was also pretty normal. Death was never a horrifying idea. It was a part of life. Then there was disease, which ended up causing irreversible damage to people. I became aware of it so soon — like my mother’s condition, for instance, which rendered her bedridden, and my half-brother, who was born with cerebral palsy. It wasn’t as final or as transformative as death, but it affected me a lot more. But if you’re in a Punjabi setting, you just learn how to laugh at things and find that pulse of dark comedy. Even at a funeral in a Punjabi family, there are absurd things going on where people are just discussing food, or talking about random stuff. It’s such a strange mix of, you know, Thanatos and Eros which get muddled up with this one broad stroke of absurdity.

ELLE: What do you think Lali says about contemporary Pakistani cinema at this particular moment?

SSK: Our identity as Pakistani cinema and not as Lollywood (what it used to be called) is rather new. We’re quite young in that sense. We’ve been getting this kind of global visibility for about 10-12 years now. There’s an interesting variety of films coming out of Pakistan, and at the risk of sounding immodest, I’d like to say that Lali seems like a step forward.

Our endeavour with films like this is to make space, and the hope is that we are able to make more films. Every two years we make something, and then there’s a gap. There’s a lot of isolated independent work. We need to be more consistent as we build our identity.

ELLE: How has your experience been taking the film all over the world? How was it to screen it at the opening night of the Tasveer Film Festival in Seattle?

SSK: It was interesting to watch a very German audience at the Berlinale laughing at these very Punjabi jokes. When you can make people laugh and laugh together, that, for me, is an achievement. Tragedy is still understood more easily, and a dramatic moment or an emotionally charged moment usually gets the desired collective response. But with humour, it’s tough because it is sometimes so rooted in the language or a cultural context, and something that could be funny in a culture could be really offensive in another. At the BFI in London too, we had a predominantly white audience. I was like, where are my South Asians at? And with this film I didn’t want to explain what a jamun is, what mehendi is… I didn’t want to give any footnotes.

At Tasveer here in Seattle, we had people from Lahore, Sikhs wearing paghs, Indians… my people, in short. So at the post-show Q&A, the questions were about finer details. There’s more mazaa in that, to be honest. We had a similar experience in LA and Toronto too. It’s my first time at Tasveer in person. ZindagiTamasha (2019) played here during COVID, but it was all virtual at the time. That being said, I’ve known of Tasveer for a while and friends and fellow filmmakers have shown films here and have always had good things to say about it. My experience has been incredible — the spirit of the festival, the opening gala, the full house at the screening, the loyal audience Tasveer has managed to garner over the years

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