Shamim Sarif is an award-winning queer British South Asian film director, and his fifth feature film, Polarized, will premiere on 18th March as part of BFI Flare – the UK’s LGBTQIA+ film festival, which runs from 15th – 28th March on London’s Southbank.
Described as Wild Rose meets Brokeback Mountain, Ploarized is set on the stunning Canadian prairies. This slow-burning tale follows two women from different worlds living in the same town. Lisa, a struggling singer/songwriter from a white bible-belt farming community and Dalia’s Muslim family have left Palestine to set up an ‘agri-tech’ company in Canada and are planning her wedding to her straight high school sweetheart. Both women must come to terms with their queer identity and the barriers imposed by family, religion, race and community in the post-Trump/Brexit era.
Shamim, who made the film with her wife, the Palestinian film producer Hanan Kattan, has always mined her own queer love story for inspiration for her films, and Polarized is no different.
She told QX: “I wanted to explore what it might take for two young women, one evangelical Christian, one Palestinian Muslim, both ingrained with certain beliefs about the ‘other’, to step outside the unspoken barriers between them to become friends and, ultimately, fall in love. It’s an emotional journey I experienced when I fell in love with another woman, someone who was ‘wrong’ from all the traditional perspectives.
I was raised in a Muslim household, and 27 years ago, coming out was a real problem. LGBTQIA+ representation was scarce on screen. Things have changed, but not everywhere; recent events in Iran and executions in Saudi have highlighted how brutally hard it continues to be for women and queer people all over the Middle East and parts of Asia. It’s been over a decade since my first query feature films, I Can’t Think Straight and The World Unseen, were released – but every day, I still get messages on social media from women who tell me how these stories changed their lives.”
Polarized pushes the boundaries of how queer women of colour are portrayed on film and is groundbreaking in its depiction of contemporary Palestinians beyond the shoebox of Middle Eastern conflict. The soundtrack consists of contemporary Arabic hip hop and rap, as well as American bluegrass and country music.
