In world where film festival organizers were looking for stories of honor killings, bombs and bearded terrorists from Pakistan, filmmaker Ayesha Khan insisted on telling the story of another Pakistan. ‘The real Pakistan’, she asserts’ I wanted to show people, a country of ordinary people with ordinary lives’. And thus the film Kashf or ‘Lifting of the Veil’ was born.

Described by critics as ‘a captivating homage to a Pakistan of tolerance, grace, aspiration and good humor’, ‘a huge and impressive accomplishment by a gifted Pakistani woman’ and ‘a riveting film’, Kashf is Pakistan’s first English language film in thirty years. The film, which was shot entirely in Pakistan, is currently on a ‘rolling’ distribution across the US and Canada. Kashf has also garnered significant international recognition at the Cannes and Berlin film festivals as well as the Santa Fe festival where it was nominated for the best edited film.
Kashf is wholly Ayesha’s brainchild. ‘I wrote it, I directed it. I even had to act in the damned thing’, Ayesha says. A graduate of Mount Holyoke College, Massachusetts, Ayesha owns a film production company by the name of Indus Valley Productions, which is based in New York, Santa Fe, New Mexico and Lahore. With her Kashf debut Ayesha has joined the ranks of a new generation of media savvy Pakistani film-makers who are using cutting-edge technology imaginatively and seem determined to fight the negative stereotypes Pakistan is generating around the world. ‘My goal is to create a dialogue through the films, both within the Muslim world and elsewhere. As a Pakistani-American I feel a keen sense of responsibility more than ever to pursue this line of work in light of today’s socio-political environment’, she says.

Kashf’s screenplay is based on a short story Ayesha found while rumaging through old newspapers. Ayesha wrote the screenplay way back in 2003 and later came to Pakistan for pre-production, to gauge the local media scene. Here she found ‘a great energy’ with the opening up of the media . ‘Quite frankly I was stunned by the media revolution in Pakistan’, she says. However due to funding issues it was later in 2007 that she took up the project again. ‘When we re-started we made a conscious decision we would make this a Pakistani production, with an all Pakistani cast and crew, (except for the departments heads who came from NewYork) to see if we could pull it off’.

‘Challenging’ is how Ayesha describes her experience of shooting the film in Pakistan. ‘We had to get all the equipment from New York,’ she said. ‘Nobody would insure us when we told them where we were going. They would just laugh. But in hindsight this was a good move since we are now a full-blown production house in Pakistan’, she says. The lack of infrastructure in Pakistan is certainly no laughing matter but even under the direst of circumstances it turned out to be just that. Ayesha recalls an incident at the EverNew Studios in Lahore. ‘We were waiting for some furniture to arrive from Bari Studios next door and it was taking a long time. Finally, I asked our set designer “Is it coming on a donkey cart?� And lo behold, the door opened and an actual donkey cart pulled up to the sound stage with a wizened old driver and furniture piled sky high! You can imagine how the crew cracked up!’

Ayesha chose to base the film in Lahore for the obvious reasons, with the city having an incredible selection of historic locations and architecture . ‘I love Lahore as a city and it was a dream come true to shoot my first feature film there. Lahore really looks like a picture postcard in the film’, she says. Ayesha even describes Kashf’s soundtrack as a collection of the ‘sounds of Lahore’. This soundtrack as well as Kashf’s music video ‘Khayal’, which is currently featuring on MTV, has done immensely well. ‘In fact for the first time ever the soundtrack of a Pakistani film is available internationally on digital music outlets like iTunes, Amazon etc’. Ayesha says very proudly.

A blend of philosphical introspection interspersed with refreshing humor, Kashf follows the journey of its protagonist Armaghan into the world of Sufi mysticism. Armaghan, played by newcomer Bilal Zaman, was ‘born out of an oath his mother made to a Sufi peer to let her child walk the Sufi path’. However, shortly after his birth when his father dies Armaghan is sent off to the US to live with relatives. He returns after some twenty-five years later to discover veiled family secrets and the path of, after being visited by visions and hallucinations. He embarks on his ‘vision quest’, to find ‘the Master waiting for him to awaken him to his calling’. Eventually, he makes peace with himself and the world around him, as the film ends with Armaghan symbolically taking the peer's hand in his own.

Ayesha has been somewhat ostracized for choosing to focus on Sufism, which many deem irrelevant in today’s Pakistan. Ayesha disagrees.’ Sufism permeates and enriches our cultural identity in ways which are visceral. Unlike Wahabism which is a recent phenomenon, Sufism has been part of this land we claim as Pakistan since before the 12th century and Sufi saints like Data Sahib, Bulleh Shah are an integral part of our culture whether you consider yourself Sufi or not. It is only recently that all our conversation has become all about Wahabism and Talibanization. So I explored Sufism in Kashf to show the more esoteric part of Islam, one that advocates Unity, not divisiveness’. This exploration has even led Ayesha to feel somewhat blessed by the saints. ‘Every time we went to a Mazaar to shoot a scene it would rain except when we were ready to shoot. It was bizarre - until people told me there is a belief that the saints are blessing you with rain’, she notes.

Such whimsical religiosity pretty much sets the tone for the film, influencing even its mundane aspects like the cast selection. ‘The movie itself chose the cast’, Ayesha believes. ‘When I look back on the casting process (which incidentally took almost three years) there were many who came in the beginning and dropped out because of delays in the shoot. I firmly believe that the cast that we shot with had to be in this movie.’ Kashf’s cast is made up of all newcomers with the exception of Rasheed Naz, who were picked up through an audition process. I was going to call Rasheed Naz, whom I consider an icon for Pakistanis, to play the role of the Sufi Pir but I was horrified and awed at his professionalism because he actually arrived for an audition!’ Ayesha says.

Interestingly Shahrukh Khan was the first actor Ayesha approached for the lead in Kashf in 2004. ‘It was a very different project at that point, the script as well as budget and we were looking at Indian financing. I met with Shahrukh in Mumbai. He was quite interested in doing a project in Pakistan, however, his dates were not available for the shoot in 2004 and it was a very different version of the story than the one we finally filmed as we scaled back everything to keep it a Pakistani film. Also given the level of his popularity - it would have been unfeasible for the security concerns’.

Among the future projects Ayesha is working on are ‘La Boheme’, an adaptation of the opera set in Pakistan and ‘The Interlopers’ a political thriller set in the US. Ayesha also hopes to initiate short training sessions in Pakistan, introducing newcomers to the principals of filmmaking. ‘It will be more like boot camp rather than a theory based program. Of course it would be great if we had state funding like China or Iran but that seems to be a distant future. However, for now my company as well as ‘Talking Filmain’, my affiliate company in Pakistan, is acting as a consultant and line producer to projects submitted by Pakistani filmmakers.

Ayesha seems to firmly believe that the emerging Pakistani cinema will hold its own, ‘I think as much as we are enamored with Bollywood movies, the success of Khuda Ke Liye and other recent Pakistani films has proved that there is a demand for our own stories.’ Ayesha feels that distributors and cinema owners in Pakistan must give top priority to releasing Pakistani films over and above others, an existing discrepancy that partly explains why Kashf has not been released in Pakistan yet. ‘Trying to get dates with Bollywood films in the theaters is a nightmare’, Ayesha says.

‘Until you have production which is backed by national distribution of our films, there can be no real revival of our cinema’, Ayesha believes. ‘I sincerely look forward to a time when people in Pakistan will want to see only Pakistani films. I would hope that my film makes its own small contribution in encouraging audiences not just to return to the cinema in Pakistan to watch Pakistani movies but invoke in them a sense of pride of authorship; Kashf is a Pakistani movie with an all Pakistani cast set in the most beautiful city in the world, Lahore’.