Few Pakistani films have managed to confront so many of their audience’s cultural taboos than Bol.
Few Pakistani films have managed to confront so many of their audience’s cultural taboos than Shoaib Mansoor’s 2011 film Bol (roughly meaning “voice” in Urdu). This drama was released with critical acclaim, achieving lofty ratings across Letterboxd, IMDb, and won the audience award at the 2012 Fukuoka International Film Festival.
The story follows Zainab, a woman on death row, as she is given one last chance to speak to the media. She recounts the story which led to her facing capital punishment for having killed her father. As she traces back the events which led to her standing in front of the press, she details her deeply religious father’s abusive actions towards her family. This abuse largely stems from the treatment of one of the children in particular, Saifi, an intersex person. Saifi was originally viewed by their father as the response to his prayers, as the son which had long been awaited after only having daughters. However, Saifi’s gender ambiguity led to the father to feel great shame and hatred, leading to the father locking Saifi away and refusing to let Saifi be seen in the outside world as Saifi begins to experiment with their gender identity. Having been raised as a boy, Saifi’s expression of attraction to men and desire to present themselves as a woman at times causes isolation from their family.
Humaima Malik brings great depth in her portrayal of Zainab, and delivers a quite captivating performance at the helm of this production. Similarly, her counterpart Manzar Sehbai’s delivery of the role of the father is chilling in his realistic depiction of an abusive, religious paternal figure.
The film poses an important question for Pakistani audiences. This film uses the character of Zainab, who uses Islamic text to argue against her father’s hateful perspective. The film asks why intersex people, and maybe even why all people, shouldn’t be accepted in the name of Islam if this very religion teaches that God was the one who created them.
Overall, this film manages to tackle a multitude of problems modern Pakistan faces, confronting each of them in the domain of the household. Mansoor manages to not only confront the majorly negative treatment of LGBTQIA+ people in Pakistan, but also manages to shed light on other social issues such as poverty, overpopulation (and rapid population growth), silencing of women, and the death penalty using this film. While this aim to tackle so many problems can, at times, crowd the film, leading us away from the central plotline, this film’s earnest attempt at deconstructing all these societal problems make it a great watch and give it the impression of being quite a groundbreaking entity for Pakistani cinema.
Bol is available to watch for free on YouTube.
