Noor & Layla, directed by Fawzia Mirza, is a short film presenting five vignettes from a relationship between two Muslim women—intimate and quiet moments of two people in love—and explores themes of reclaiming/redefining ritual and personal tradition. Is it the end of the road for these two Muslim women … or is it the beginning?
On Tuesday, April 20, I chatted with Fawzia Mirza about her new short, with some focus on how identity influences filmmaking and how intimate filmmaking creates intimate films.
The interview has been edited for clarity.
Boston Hassle: Could you talk a little bit about your inspiration for the short?
Fawzia Mirza: Noor & Layla is a film about reclaiming ritual and, like much of my work, is inspired by my desire to connect my Muslim and South Asian and queer identity. Specifically, Noor & Layla is inspired by several moments that my wife, Andria Wilson Mirza, and I had during the pandemic when we were in Toronto, and it was during the month of Ramadan in 2020. We’d gotten married in a really small private ceremony in February and hadn’t really been able to experience a lot of the very standard or typical rituals you have in big, huge, South Asian weddings. But when we were spending this time during Ramadan sheltering in place, we kind of created some of those rituals for ourselves in that time, just the two of us. So, things like the henna scene in the film and the idea of your partner’s name being henna-ed into your hand somewhere, listening to the call to prayer, but hearing it performed by a woman instead of man. That’s not the first time that I’ve thought about that or written it into my work, but it was a huge thing that we were thinking about during this time as we’re just celebrating breaking fast together alone in the pandemic. It was definitely a time where we were both reminded of the importance of no matter where we are, no matter what’s going on, no matter what’s happening in the world around us, we have to each day celebrate love and celebrate the triumphs that we have, no matter what anyone else thinks about our love.
BH: I was struck by the structure of the short, in the way that your identity not only comes through in the storytelling, but also in the filmmaking. Can you speak on how your identity influences the storytelling and also how you found it influencing the filmmaking itself?
FM: The call to prayer, the adhan, is definitely something that I have heard throughout my life and been impacted by throughout my life. While it often means it’s time to pray, as a queer Muslim person who’s been reconciling my religion with my queerness for as long as I’ve been grappling with my queer identity, I’ve wondered about what that call to prayer means for me and what it means for others for Muslims around the world, because I’m definitely not the only one. There’s 1.8. billion Muslims in the world. And what I’ve been thinking about the last few years, to me the call to prayer and being Muslim isn’t really about a test of how religious you are, it’s not about that. It’s about, how do you think about all of these markers of religion or these moments or these rituals? How do they impact your individual life? How do they manifest? With the call to prayer– those clocks on side tables, in apps, in laptops, or people singing them live– what I started thinking a lot about is that sometimes you go pray and then sometimes there’s all sorts of other things happening when the call to prayer goes off. So no matter what, it’s a really beautiful marker of time. I mean, even if we think about it from a non-strictly-Muslim perspective, we should get up and shift what’s happening five times a day. We should be shifting and doing something other than working or sitting at a laptop. I know I’ve been in arguments, I’ve been in intimate situations, I’ve been eating, I’ve been on a trip, I’ve been mourning, there’s so many different aspects of our lives that happen at those five times a day, and I’ve definitely been thinking about what those moments are for me, and thought about how maybe this is a way for me to present queerness and queer Muslim-ness.
I think the beauty of queer Muslim identity is it embraces all aspects of Muslim-ness. That’s the beauty of the marginalized within an already marginalized community, that there’s space for all of us there. So, whether you are very ritualistic, very methodical about how you practice your Islam, or you don’t practice as much, you aren’t as ritualistic, there’s room for all of us, to me, in a queering of Islam, whether your queer or straight. I fell deeply in love with my wife, and I feel like love is an essential part of faith and of the divine. When I think about love, and I think about relationships, I feel like I don’t get to see queer Muslim love a lot, celebrated in a really positive, powerful, beautiful way. Just like the most basic things, you just don’t see enough of that. It’s always about the conflict, and I know that, as a storyteller, that’s really really important. I also just want to see us thrive, and love, and have hope. I really wanted to see and portray queer Muslim love on screen in a way that just felt beautiful. And in those moments, the sort of queering of time, sometimes we don’t really remember the order of all the moments, the order of all the operations, but what we do remember is the moment. And so what is time? It’s sometimes more just about the charge and the feeling and the passion of the moment that really holds us and carries us.
BH: Can you talk a bit about Chapter 2: Maghrib? This is the dinner scene, and there is just something so romantic about it, so I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit from a storytelling perspective and from a filmmaking perspective. I think it comes through really beautifully as this denouement before the last chapter, which is a little more quiet.
FM: In many ways, it’s like there’s these five times a day, there’s these five calls to prayer, they’re also five very different kinds of emotions. And, with the Maghrib scene, which is at sunset, the thing that I was reflecting on is how romance can turn into horror or a ghost story really quickly. It’s this similar kind of lighting sometimes, just different music is being played. All of the moments are different ways that the two people are interacting, are connecting. And so Maghrib is, which is sunset, magic hour across the board, for filmmakers, for watching a sunset, for breaking fast, which is what they’re doing.
BH: It’s a new day too, if you’re Muslim.
FM: It’s a new day, exactly. Sometimes you think is the sun going down, is the sun going up? There’s so much magic at that time. So really playing with that heightened sense of romance and connection and flirtation and the first date, the pun, breaking fast together, but then also, it just shifting into something really different and wanting to find ways that two people connect. The language we’re using in Noor & Layla is a lot of Muslim language, but really wanting it to be deeply relatable. These two young women are connecting over, “Oh, what was that sound, something broke,” but then they just start talking about different witches and ghosts and scary creatures and beings from their respective cultures, respective to the actors actual cultural background. Nicole [Nwokolo, who portrays Noor] is Nigerian, and Sahar [B. Agustin-Maleki, who portrays Layla] is Filipinx and Iranian, so all the different references are meant to be kind of insider language, but they’re referencing different mythologies from their respective cultures. They could be talking about anything at that point really, but it’s just about two people having this other shared language they can connect on no matter what background they come from, because they both happen to be Muslim. And then the comedy of yelling this verse at this possible ghost that may have broken this glass and then just the ridiculousness of that bringing them back together again, showing their connection. The goal was that, even if you don’t get all of it, the emotional journey they’re on, you can vibe with. And if you get the layers of it then you’re really connecting at a whole other level because it’s where you come from.
BH: Can you talk a little bit about that because some people would argue that, if you want to connect to an audience, you have to make it broad? It sounds like it’s very important to your way of filmmaking, keeping things specific.
FM: All my work is deeply specific. For me, the relatability across age, identity, experience, background, culture, language is definitely digging into the specific, and I think that’s on brand for me. With this particular film, I was probably the least concerned about all audiences in anything I’ve ever made and maybe anything I will ever make. It was definitely in some ways an experiment, and I had opportunities to explain more. I mean, in Chapter Two, there was definitely a moment where I wondered about putting subtitles in to make sure everyone knew what it was, because there’s plenty of Muslims who won’t get it, there’s plenty of queer people who won’t get it. It just felt like, why bother?
BH: Because what you’re trying to go for is an emotion?
FM: Yes, five chapters, five times a day, five moments in a relationship, five different emotional beats that, really, could be and should be relatable. If even one of them is relatable, great. There’s so many times where you’re in a relationship that ends, and then only afterwards, you understand what certain moments were about. My last film was a three minute short, I Know Her, and I really wanted to make a perfect comedy bite. It was still deeply specific, but you got the joke. And, it’s very, very specific, but also still broad reaching. Noor & Layla was not that. This is meant to be, you’re gonna get more of it if you are even more connected into the culture. I didn’t get all the witch and cultural kind of references [in Chapter 2]. I had to look them up to really understand them, and that’s the work that I’m willing to do, and we all should be willing to do. I mean, we’ve all been doing that. As a queer brown Muslim woman, I’ve been doing that with plenty of broad comedy that centered the cis white male narrative for my whole life. And so, I feel if we have to do a little bit more work for this, then that’s okay. It’s not necessarily meant for everyone, and if they don’t want to watch it, that’s fine. One of my intentions was to make something that, if you got nothing else from this, you got that these two queer Muslim women’s chemistry is so awesome. If you take that from this film, then what it does, subconsciously, is it rewrites what you think of Muslim love to be. And, in Muslim-ness, you’re starting to suddenly have new images, new stories, subconsciously, subtextually in your experience. That’s the goal of this. For instance, you’re subconsciously having a new experience of what the call to prayer means. So, the next time you hear it, you’re feeling this pleasant feeling rather than some sort of negative harsh reaction that has been instilled in us by Western media as it being something that’s evoked in, like, the show 24 or something like that. So really, if those several small moments are subversively impacting the viewer in the future, great! That’s also a purpose, and it’s meant for queer Muslim people to see themselves.
BH: Did making this short reframe anything for you in your relationship to Islam or even just in relationship to your wife?
FM: I think all my work is always me having a public conversation about really personal thoughts and dialogues and issues and struggles and reconciliations. Noor & Layla was definitely no different in that respect. On top of everything, it was a really beautiful experience to make a film during pandemic, produced by my wife, that started very much as a love story and wanting to share and celebrate love that was deeply inspired by our connection. As every day that goes by brings us closer, this film definitely brought us closer, and it was really exciting and beautiful to make a film in Toronto, in Canada, which is where I’m originally from. I was born in Canada, in Ontario, and so to be able to make a project with mostly Black and brown and queer and nonbinary folks in Toronto in association with CDC, with Fae Pictures, with my wife, with this great co-producer, Shonna Foster, and just this incredible team. As I move forward in my journey as a director– I’m going to be directing my first feature in early 2022– it’s just solidified for me that I’m on the right path. Islam means “to submit.” If anything, this film helped me submit to my role as a director and continuing to help me submit to the flow of whatever is meant to be, will be.
BH: Can you talk a little bit more about the feature you’re working on and the Powderkeg: Fuse incubator program you’re in?
FM: The feature that I’m going to be shooting and filming in 2022 is called Me, My Mom, and Sharmila. I wrote the screenplay, and I will direct it. It’s an adaptation of my one-woman play, which was about me, my relationship with my mother, and our shared love for Indian film icon Sharmila Tagore. It’s exciting, because the reason that I was in Toronto in the first place was that the screenplay was invited to the Toronto International Film Festival writer studio in March, and then it was also invited to the TIFF Filmmaker Lab in September. I got to workshop it and revise it in Canada, while I was there during the pandemic. I also got to really connect with a great team. There’s a great producer who’s on board, Gharrett Patrick Paon. My wife, Andria Wilson Mirza, is producing that as well. That’ll shoot in Sydney, Nova Scotia, and in Karachi, Pakistan, and it’s set in three different time periods. And then, Paul Feig’s Powderkeg: Fuse 2 is a women’s writer-director incubator program through Feig’s Powderkeg production company. This is the second installment of the program, and I got into it last year. I was invited to pitch a project for a short film, and they selected my pitch. And then we started developing the pitch into a script. COVID and the pandemic impacted that, so we’re going to be shooting sometime this year. They’re producing it in conjunction with Google and Google Assistant. We’ve gotten to connect with a team, and with Paul Feig, and get notes on the script. We’ve been in the in the pre-production phase of that project, and we’ll hopefully, before the end of the year, shot it, finished post, and be submitting it to two festivals for everyone to watch.
BH: Do you think it’ll be more nerve-wracking to have to cast your mother and make a movie that’s gonna be intimately about your mother, or with Noor and Layla, casting and then making a movie that’s intimately about your wife? Because I can imagine if I had to cast my mother, it would be very nerve wracking.
FM: Well, even in Noor & Layla, there’s the inspiration from the love and from my wife, but then, it always kind of transforms into a whole other character. The end characters end up being inspired versus actually, truly a carbon copy intention. So, same thing with Me, My Mom, and Sharmila. The play was ninety-five percent based off of true stories. By the time we film it, it’s going to be much much less than that. I think the play was a great jumping-off point, but the screenplay has taken many other turns since then. The mother character will be really fun to cast and definitely a version of maybe my mother, but also with all my work, all of these characters, their specificity, it could be any of our South Asian mothers. We can all see maybe a version of our mother, even if you’re not South Asian, in that character. I think casting is always exciting and always a little nerve wracking, because you want the perfect person for the role, and who knows where that person is? They’re not necessarily always known to you yet. It’s going to be an exciting adventure, but I can’t wait until we get to dig into that part of it.
BH: What filmmaking advice would you give to someone, especially to someone who’s just starting out? You transitioned from being a lawyer to acting, so I’m curious if that has affected the advice you would give.
FM: I think everyone’s path is different. Whether it’s your career path, or you’re coming out path as a queer person, or as somebody who’s now married, your relationship path. No matter how much advice anybody gives you, you have to filter it for what works for you in the moment you’re in, for your life and what feels safe and inspiring for you. That journey is always going to be different. For me, it was going from a lawyer to then being an actor to then being a writer, who’s writing for me and people I know in my community, and then now transitioning into being a writer-director, primarily. If I were to just be sitting there trying to carve out the perfect path for someone, I don’t know if that’s the way the thing I would choose, but that’s also just not how life works.
So, this is the perfect path for me. I learned a lot along the way, and I continue to learn, and I make lots of mistakes now, and I’m sure will continue to. It’s all about just hoping that you’re learning a little bit more from everything you do that you apply to the next thing. I think in terms of career advice, I think all of that is career advice. In terms of being a writer, I think everyone has a story to tell, whether you’re an artist or not, or you consider yourself an artist or a writer or not. When you’re trying to figure out what to write, start by writing what you know and telling a story that feels really personal or telling a story that’s something that you tell regularly. Write that. And if you want to make something or film something, then film a story that you know and that you tell and that feels personal and that you can back up and have so many layers of. Get a cell phone and make it on your cell phone. There’s definitely resources that are available that’ll work great.
BH: My last question is if there’s anything you’re super into at the moment, whether it’s a film, a TV show, or just doing something?
FM: Well, it’s Ramadan, the month of fasting, so I’m really into waking up by making my morning snacks and drinks and fasting all day, so that’s definitely a major thing I’m into. I just moved back to LA after being in Toronto for a year, so I’m into walking again, every single day. There’s this film that came out last year, but I really love plugging it because she’s just so good. I was just talking about this film last night, Radha Blank’s The 40-Year-Old Version.
BH: I loved The 40-Year-Old Version.
FM: It’s a great movie. I feel like there’s definitely a film in my future that that film helped me write, or at least, that film gave me the strength to put down into words something I will write. I’m really also into supporting an artist in whatever way it is. If you have $1 or if you have $1,000, support a local artist, support a queer artist, support a Black artist, support an indigenous artist, support a brown artist. Take an extra second to think about what you’re purchasing that you’re buying, your art or something you’re wearing, and think about a different place you could place that money. So, thinking about that a lot these days too.
Noor & Layla will be playing virtually through Inside Out from May 27 to June 6. For future updates on Noor & Layla, please visit Baby Daal Productions.
Noor & Layla
2021
Dir. Fawzia Mirza
8 min
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