Let me be totally honest with you,” Kamran Shahid tells me, “I have the least amount of risk when it comes to Huay Tum Ajnabi [HTA]. My full-time job is still journalism — and that’s not going to change anytime soon, whether HTA is a success or not.”

The blunt confession by the film’s writer and director, followed by a genuinely infectious hearty laugh, took this writer by surprise.

Although we had just met, it took me a few hours to realise that this is who Kamran Shahid is: a jovial, unapologetically frank man who likes straightening facts on the spot. Blame the latter two on his journalism career, I guess.

Kamran Shahid is well-known as the host of the political news show On the Front with Kamran Shahid, on Dunya News — a post he’s held on to for 11 years now. On the other hand, he is also the son of veteran film actor Shahid (surname Hameed) — also the producer of HTA — though the lineage was of little help when it came to making the film, he confesses.

The Eid-ul-Fitr release Huay Tum Ajnabi is a romantic movie and it just so happens that the story is set at an important historical juncture. It’s also political talk show host Kamran Shahid’s debut as a film director

Just a few hours before, Kamran Shahid had showcased an assortment of scenes at the film’s preview in a cinema at Xinhua Mall, Lahore. The scenes had caught Mikaal Zulfiqar, Shamoon Abbasi, Sohail Ahmed and Shafqat Cheema — a few of the movie’s expansive cast attending the screening — by surprise.

The cast roster also includes Sadia Khan, Ayesha Omer and Alyy Khan, among others.

HTA has taken a long time getting to the cinema screen. The long-gestating production started four years ago — six, if you count the prior two years of penning the screenplay.

Set during the fall of Dhaka, the film predates the flurry of productions that began popping up last year, as if someone had just realised at the last moment that 2022 was the 50th year of the ‘fall of Dhaka’.

HTA is a big production, with special effects done by Scott Newman (a veteran visual effects artist from Hollywood), and 11 songs that include the who’s who of music (singers include Abida Parveen, Ali Zafar and Asim Azhar, music by Baqir Abbas, Sahir Ali Bagga and Naveed Nashad, and lyrics by Abbas Tabish, amongst others).

Though the story is set during the period leading up to the secession of East Pakistan, HTA is heavy on the romance, Mikaal Zulfiqar, the film’s lead actor tells Icon.

“I play a young student leader who goes by the name of Nizamuddin,” the actor says while we dine at an uber-posh Chinese restaurant after the screening.

“It’s a very heroic character. There’s a lot to do, and he’s doing a lot,” he adds. The character falls into your classic hero stereotype. He is a romantic but, given the circumstances he gets into, he gets to be a man of action, the actor explains.

“There are a lot of elements to what might seemingly be a straightforward archetype,” Mikaal says, adding qualities such as strength of will and justification of cause to the character’s traits.

Mikaal tells me that, in a way, Nizamuddin reminds him of the character he played in Sherdil. Both characters had an obligation to the nation, and both characters are romantics at heart.

“Actually, I’ve only ever done two scenes where I was genuinely thrilled and scared at the same time. One was in Sherdil, during an aerial action sequence — I am not a trained fighter pilot, so that was quite scary — the other was in [HTA],” he says.

“There is this scene in the latter half of the film, where I had to run through an actual minefield. There were tanks, gunfire, bullets — it required a lot of bravery. But then again, brave characters require bravery from actors,” he adds with a knowing, wry smile.

“It’s a mammoth project, so firstly Kamran and Shahid sahib get credit for that,” Mikaal says, clarifying that some logistical elements, which obviously involved support from ISPR, the military’s public relations wing, cannot even be paid for.

“An actor also needs paraphernalia to react naturally,” he continues, explaining the difficulty an actor might have when they are supposed to imagine a small room that’s doubling as a prison camp, versus being on lavish sets that actually look like prison camps.

“There is an evident difference in the believability of performance between imagining tanks that are outside, as opposed to actually seeing tanks outside,” he says.

Shamoon Abbasi, also present at the dinner, seconds Mikaal’s point on the importance of production quality.

“There is a sense of pictorial quality in the film,” he says, “given the way Kamran has depicted the era, with the uniforms and the locations — Lahore hasn’t been shot the way it has been in this film, I can tell you — so one can attest that, as a filmmaker, Kamran hasn’t squandered money on needless bits of glamour that don’t serve the story.

“These are the kind of people the industry is looking for, to course-correct itself, right?” he asks, not really fishing for a reply.

Shamoon, one of the powerhouse actors who can slip into any roles, but is mostly relegated to playing villains, plays — surprise, surprise — a villain in HTA.

“I play Jabbar, a Mukti Bahini commander who loves his country,” Shamoon tells me. “When Kamran approached me, he gave me a very solid reason to sign on to [HTA]: he told me that he wanted to represent history in a politically correct way. From Bangladesh’s perspective, Jabbar would not just be a villain who hates Pakistan.” The character has a relevant backstory, the actor tells me.

Another aspect Shamoon, Mikaal and Nadeem Mandviwalla, the distributor of the movie, also at the dinner table with us, agree on is the power of Kamran’s script.

The dialogues are pretty good, and there are quite a few emotional highpoints in the screenplay, as this writer hears from sources who have seen the film.

In fact — and as unsurprising as it may be to read — it was the screenplay that made HTA happen in the first place.

“I didn’t have a choice,” Kamran tells me earlier over a cup of tea at his family haveli near Anarkali. “I am a student of history, so it was both easy and convenient for me to gravitate towards the subject.”

During our conversation, I learn of his first book, Gandhi and the Partition of India, his education (he is a Masters in Modern History from Government College, Lahore, and has earned a degree in International Relations and Political Theory from England), and the influence his mother, Munazza Shahid, had on his academic career (she studied at the University of Westminster, London, he tells me).

“Contrary to what people assume, our family does not have a film background. We migrated from Karnal, Haryana, and Liaquat Ali Khan was my great grandfather. We are zamindars [landowners] by profession. When my father, Shahid Hameed, ventured into acting, my grandfather did not talk to him for two years. In fact, until my grandfather’s death, this haveli didn’t even entertain anyone from the film fraternity.”

“I never had any exposure to filmmaking,” Kamran continues. “I wasn’t even allowed on my father’s sets — we were that conservative.”

Yet, there is something in Kamran, one feels, that compels him to tell stories.

Kamran hasn’t studied film, nor has he learned filmmaking. His education literally happened on this movie’s set. His reason for directing the story is quite simple, he explains: he knew nobody could do justice to his screenplay, and that he was craving a challenge.

“I have a love for the movies,” he says — and he does. A few years ago, Kamran’s popularity went through the roof when he travelled to India to interview Bollywood icons Lata Mangeshkar, Dilip Kumar, Gulzar, Pooja Bhatt, Rishi Kapoor and Mahesh Bhatt, amongst others.

A giant blown-up autographed picture of Lata Mangeshkar — a gift to Kamran — hangs on the wall behind me. The walls around us are lined with books and posters. One assumes this particular room to be his secret hideaway, which fuels his creative aspirations.

“I will always tell romantic stories — but what one has to understand is that romance has a larger canvas than what one assumes,” he tells me.

HTA is a romantic movie; it just so happens that the story is set at an important historical juncture, Kamran explains. While characters such as Indira Gandhi, Sheikh Mujeeb and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (Samina Peerzada, Mehmood Aslam and Adnan Jeelani) do have screentime in the story, they’re only there for necessary scenes that, he felt, were important for the narrative, Kamran says.

Kamran also clarifies that, contrary to what people assume, HTA is not an ISPR production. He has no interest in telling stories that propagate messages, and he is not making a film to lecture people, he explicitly states.

Talking about the uncertain business prospects of Pakistani films of late, Kamran explains that the idea of only making money doesn’t appeal to him. His aspirations are, at first, creative and then financial.

“If the film is a success, then I may or may not make another film. But what I can definitely tell you is that if [HTA] doesn’t make money, then I will continue to make movies until I deliver a super-hit.”

Something tells me that irrespective of success — or his commitment to his day job as a political talk show host — Kamran Shahid is in the filmmaking business for the long haul. Maybe it’s the genes. Or the challenge. Or perhaps both.

Published in Dawn, ICON, April 9th, 2023