Set across decades and continents, the film The Queen of My Dreams is a dramedy that follows the story of Azra, young queer Muslim woman who has a complicated relationship with her mother. Azra is played by Amrit Kaur, known for her role in The Sex Lives of College Girls, and Ms. Marvel's Nimra Bucha plays Azra's mother Miriam.
When a family tragedy happens, Azra goes to Pakistan and, through that journey, travels through different time periods with flashbacks that show impactful moments of her and her mother’s life. Bouncing between 1960s Karachi, 1980s Nova Scotia and 1990s Pakistan, The Queen of My Dreams explores family, memory, and the Bollywood dreams that shape us.
The film will be showing this Saturday, Aug. 23 evening at the Oriental Theatre as a part of Milwaukee Film’s Cinematic Sisterhood series presented by The Women's Fund of Greater Milwaukee. Writer and director Fawzia Mirza will be in attendance for an extended Q&A following the screening, along with producer Andria Wilson-Mirza.
"The Queen of My Dreams" has had a long journey to its 2023 feature, which is an extended version of a three-minute experimental short film of the same name that Mirza and filmmaker Ryan Logan did back in 2012 before she even considered herself a filmmaker.
"I was reconciling my identities, I was trying to figure out how to be queer and Muslim and love Bollywood romance through art," she recalls.
Through making the short film, Mirza says she was able to find the answers she was asking about identity and share it with film festivals, which led to finding community in new ways she hadn't experienced before. It also inspired a one-person show Mirza performed that was an extension of the short.
"It was only then after I made more short films and more films got into festivals that I started to imagine that there could be a feature-length film in this. And that began this slow process of that dream taking shape," she says.
For Mirza, making The Queen of My Dreams as a Bollywood-inspired film was a necessity. Bollywood films have been a life-long connection to her community and culture — especially after Mirza's parents moved from Pakistan to a small town in Canada.
"I remember watching these [Bollywood] movies and just thinking, 'I want that love; I want that vastness; I want that kind of epic storytelling that takes place on mountaintops and deserves that level of fantasy,'" she says. "So for me the Bollywood love, the Bollywood drama, the Bollywood emotionality is something I've carried with me I think in every day of my life. And so then when I became a filmmaker, there was no doubt that I'm seeking that bigness, that vastness, that epic-ness every single moment of every frame."
In navigating the complicated family dynamics featured in the film, Mirza says she wanted to paint both the daughter and mother characters in a sympathetic light.
"I don't want to make a film where you have one villain," she notes. "I think we all kind of contribute to the complications of family dynamics and I wanted there to be compassion for the mother and the daughter.... So there's no one villain who you can place all of your misgivings upon. That was really important."
The Queen of My Dreams was first brought to Milwaukee in the 2024 Milwaukee Film Festival, and Mirza is happy to return with her film again under the Cinematic Sisterhood program during a time when access and resources for marginalized groups in film are being cut dramatically nation-wide.
"Any opportunity where any of these groups that I'm a part of are elevated and centered I think are essential to us as a culture, and I'm happy and excited to elevate that even further by being able to attend [the screening]. We need these kinds of programs now more than ever," she says.
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