Nasheed Qamar Faruqi

Maurice, Merchant Ivory (MIP)’s 1987 adaptation of E. M. Forster’s posthumously published novel, is playing at the BFI this week, as part of their “Out at the Pictures” Season. It is one of my favourite movies, with its profound and emotive central performances and bitter sweet ending. Seeing it on the big screen is a rare…

As if we needed proof that hacks indulge in wilful misinterpretation, the media is up in arms about Hilary Mantel’s quizzical and actually rather sympathetic piece about royal bodies in the London Review of Books. Metro’s Tariq Tahir roared Anger at machine made Kate! Cue irate pieces in various papers about the worst excesses of…

I so frequently find an outlet in the Twittosphere these days, that I haven’t written a post in criminal ages. Forgive me, faithful readers – all four point five of you. There should be plenty to say. Life is eventful, interesting – full of spectacle, loss, dreams and anxiety. And that’s just two weeks! Lots…

In my life drawing class last week  my wonderful drawing teacher, Francis Hoyland, made this sketch of me on an iPad.

Last night I found out that my friend, Paolo Zanotti died on December 5th, last year. He had been diagnosed with a tumor in the pancreas six weeks earlier. He was only 41. I met Paolo in 2002 at the Synapsis School for Comparative Literature in Pontignano near Siena. At first, I was struck by…

Is Amour really about love? ‘Cause I’m not feeling it.  Haneke’s films are secretive, elegant and cold. He is a master of his art, and nothing demonstrates this better than his casting of Emmanuelle Riva and Jean-Louis Trintignant: just watching them is a pleasure and a privilege. Moreover, they bring with them the intertextual connotations…

I’ve been meaning for sometime to write about a wonderful film made by a friend and film school contemporary. We saw it when it was screened at the London Film Festival last month. Antonio (Mendez Esparza) has made an elegant and humane film called Aqui y Alla, about a Mexican family, living through the reality…

To see Holy Motors and Skyfall in the same week is the cinematic equivalent of eating surf and turf. Holy Motors is preoccupied with cinema, fantasy and representation, how we create images, and how they in turn create us. Every sequence is rich with cinematic tropes: the car, the girl, the gun, the gangster, the…

I hear your voice, distant over the crackling phone line. All the years come tumbling back. I wish I had never missed you.

The loopholes in the time travel plot of Looper were irritating. You can give me all the filmic references you want (they range geekily from North by Northwest to Terminator), and solid performances (we have the usual saga of accomplished actors battling a loose script and poorly paced editing) but if I don’t believe in…

Pull, tuck, squeeze, pluck, pump, burn, crunch, cut, cleanse, tone, blow, bleach, conceal, and teeze yourself into the ideal.    

“If magic is to be defined as the employment of ineffective techniques to allay anxiety when effective ones are not available, then we must recognise that no society will ever be free from it.” These are the closing words of Keith Thomas’s remarkable book Religion and the Decline of Magic (1971). As someone who is…

In June 1947, Mountbatten, the British Viceroy of India, likened Pakistan to a tent. * “What are we doing? Administratively, it is the difference between putting up a permanent building, and a Nissen hut or a tent. As far as Pakistan is concerned we are putting up a tent. We can do no more.” His…

Disorder in Court I’ve been watching The Three Stooges lately. I love their fresh, irreverent and truthful comedy. I particularly enjoyed this little short called Disorder in Court.  It manages to poke fun at just about everyone involved in the legal process and the belief that order can somehow solve all our problems. Watch Disorder in Court.

Hello! Thanks for visiting my blog, which is primarily a space for me to share aspects of my work as a writer and director. I will also use this space to collate ideas, observations and insights about movies and film making. Of course, these things don’t exist in a vacuum so I will inevitably end…