Daring film-makers are a dying breed, especially these days when everyone wants to be a part of the revival of films in Pakistan. Writer/director Emran Hussain’s Aksbandh, which dwells on the unknown, proves that even while experimenting with new actors and dimensions, quality work can be produced here as well.

Aksbandh is the story of six friends who decide to make a found-footage film (along the lines of the mother of all such flicks, The Blair Witch Project). They visit a wilderness near Larkana, Sindh where they aim to shoot the project but their plans get disrupted when one of the crew members abandons them before they can start filming. Matters become even more complicated after mysterious, unexplained occurrences are captured on camera.

There are spine-chilling moments in Aksbandh that appear right out of nowhere; some of these are needlessly lengthy but then that’s the beauty of the found-footage genre: you can’t edit it. The second-half of the film has more thrills (the first-half is used to introduce us to the characters and their mission). The post-interval half deals with all manners of paranormal activity captured on film, for which the DoP deserves commendation, although at times the camera movement does look a bit shaky.

Screenwriters (Emran Hussain, Ayaz Samoo) said that the main reason why the viewers don’t find the film boring is because they believed in strong screen characters right from the beginning. These characters are the director Ayaan (Danial Afzal Khan), actor Sunny (Ayaz Samoo), deserter Raheel (Bilal Yousufzai), the beautiful Aaliya (Mahrukh Rizvi), the always-in-control co-director Saadia (Shehzeen Rahat) and cameraman Shehzad (Saud Imtiaz). Whatever happens to them during the film’s 86-minute run bothers the audience as they develop a kind of kinship with them, and that’s the reason why Aksbandh intrigues viewers.

Actor/co-writer Ayaz Samoo tells Images on Sunday that the film had fewer characters, until he came on board. “When we started our script, there were only two characters instead of six. We incorporated more characters in order to make things more exciting and interesting. With fewer characters, there was a chance of monotony, something we wanted to avoid.”

Unlike the rest of the cast, Ayaz Samoo (021, Moor) and Bilal Yousufzai (Halla Gulla) had worked in other films before Aksbandh. While Bilal Yousufzai’s character appears in only the first-half, it is Ayaz’s Sunny who keeps the audience laughing in this horror flick. “I left comedy to pursue serious roles, but it still remains my first love,” Ayaz Samoo explains. “I started my career as a standup comedian but wasn’t getting comedy roles on the silver screen. In Aksbandh, I saw my chance to do comedy on the big screen and I created the character of Sunny. I wanted the producers to know that I could still do comedy even after getting the Best Villain trophy at the ARY Film Awards. This was the right time to get back to the pavilion.”

This experiment by ad-makers-turned-producers Naveed Arshad and Seemeen Naveed will no doubt help the film industry along in a big way; irrespective of box office results. Times are now a changing and if we can have more projects like Aksbandh, the future is definitely bright for independent Pakistani films.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, May 29th, 2016