Last Updated on: 4th July 2023, 03:34 pm
All About Alina Khan ‘Joyland’ Trans Actress?
Pakistani transgender actress Alina Khan received the Queer Palm Award at the Cannes Film Festival for her work in Joyland.
Below is the interview he gave a few years ago.
The star of joyland Alina Khan is lighting up Cannes today! She has been awarded the Queer palm award.
A couple of years ago she came on the podcast and spoke about how she was treated growing up trans in Pakistan. pic.twitter.com/H5FIOhreEf
— The Pakistan Experience (@ThePakistanExp1) May 28, 2022
A tale of the sexual revolution, director Saim Sadiq’s Joyland tells the story of the youngest son in a patriarchal family who hopes to have a baby boy with his wife.
Instead, he joins an erotic dance theater and falls in love with the company’s director, a trans woman.
It is Pakistan’s first competition entry at the Cannes Film Festival and also won the Jury Prize in Friday’s Un Certain Regard competition, a segment focusing on innovative young film talent.
“It’s a very powerful film that represents everything we stand for,” Queer Palm jury president French director Catherine Corsini told AFP.
‘Souffle’
Corsini himself won the award last year with The Fracture, which depicts the relationship of a lesbian couple in the context of France’s ‘yellow vest’ movement.
“‘Joyland’ resonates around the world,” said Corsini. “It has strong characters that are both complex and real. Nothing is distorted. This movie blew us away.”
The Queer Palm has been won by high-profile directors in the past and has attracted top talent to their juries, but it has no official place at the world’s largest film festival.
Awards for films with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer content are already an integral part of other major film events, including Berlin, which has presented its “Teddy Award” since 1987 and integrated it into its official program.
Not so in Cannes, where the festival management won’t even have the “Queer Palm”, which has been in existence for a decade, set up in their main building, the Palais du Festival.
“It saddens me that the festival is still cold at Queer Palm,” Corsini said.
Past winners of the 2010 award, created by critic Franck Finance-Madureira, include Todd Haynes for ‘Carol’ and Xavier Dolan for “Laurence Whatevers.”
‘Joyland’ beat out several other strong entries, including Belgian director Lukas Dhont’s ‘Close’ and Kirill Serebrennikov’s “Tchaikovsky’s Wife,” both of which were nominated for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, to be announced on Saturday.
‘Joyland’ left Cannes audiences in awe and astonishment, receiving a standing ovation from the premiere guests.
“Very Schizophrenic”
Part of the surprise came from the discovery by many at Cannes that Pakistan is one of the first nations to offer legal protection from discrimination to transgender people.
In 2009, Pakistan legally recognized a third gender, and in 2018 the first transgender passport was issued.
“Pakistan is very schizophrenic, almost bipolar,” director Saim Sadiq told AFP in an interview.
“You get prejudice and some violence against a certain community, of course, but you also get this very progressive law that basically allows everyone to identify their own gender, and it also identifies a third gender,” he said.
For their short film award, the “Queer Palm” jury selected “Will You Look At Me” by Chinese director Shuli Huang.
Set in the filmmaker’s hometown, the diary-style film portrays a traditional society where parents care more about their reputations than the happiness of their gay children.
