Joyland

Watching this movie felt like a privilege: it was the privilege of being offered with a rare insight of what it means to live as a minority in today's Pakistan. It was, at the same time, the privilege of being able to look beyond the univocal and often too blurred picture we as so-called "Westerners" are provided with of this country through our mainstream medias. The picture beyond this picture that I've found in this movie was, unsurprisingly enough, that of an extremely complex net of relationships, whose single threads intertwine following the logic of some of the most authentic human emotions, with hope proving to be once and again the strongest among them all. The movie itself seems to be on the whole an ode to hope: hope to be successful in life, to embody, at last, the ideal of ourselves we've always dreamed of, to meet the person of our dreams and be able to love them and be happy with them, finally, which sums in itself all of the preceding, hope to live freely in this world. On a painful final note, the film also shows the reverse of it all, that is, the unavoidable consequences of a human life who finds barred all the roads to hope.