Concrete Dreams: A Documentary Film By Saba Khan
After winning the Best Documentary Award at the Indian World Film Festival, Saba Khan speaks to BAZAAR Art about her debut documentary film, Concrete Dreams: Some Roads Lead Home
For filmmaker, author and NYU Abu Dhabi Instructor Saba Khan, her new documentary Concrete Dreams,“Is about rupturing the myth of static futures.”
Narrated by Owais Ali and Mohammad Salman, two formerly homeless Pakistani teenagers who rose to fame after winning bronze at the Rio Street Child World Cup, the film surveys the friends’ efforts to catapult their Somebody campaign and give rise to a nationwide cultural movement empowering homeless children.
Mohammad Salman and Owais Ali
Drawn to the movement for going beyond appeals for financial support or external interventions, Khan uses her film to chart how an identity, in a city as divided by class as Karachi, is reclaimed. Filming Ali and Salman over four years in their native neighbourhoods, Khan, pointing to the sharp class divides still steering the city, admits, “It opened up gateways into parts of Karachi, allegedly my hometown, which were completely unfamiliar.”
The making of Concrete Dreams: Some Roads Lead Home
With current estimates of 1.5 million homeless children in Pakistan, Khan ensures, “The film doesn’t downsize the trauma of streetlife: crime, mafias, abuse – but it mantles against narratives of despair.” Instead, Khan is fighting against what she deems the ‘anxiety epidemic’.
“When you think of Pakistan, you think of all things combustible: a terror-and-panic rumour mill keeping us in its clutches by constantly peddling seething, doomsday narratives, plaguing us with the alleged threat of Pakistan teetering at the abyss,” she explains, preferring to provide examples of social mobility instead.
A still from Concrete Dreams: Some Roads Lead Home
“Seeing homeless children loitering aimlessly, begging, washing windscreens, eating at shrines, sleeping on footpaths, knocking at car windows as part of a daily experience growing up in Pakistan,” Khan recounts, frustrated with bystander passivity. She formerly covered Pakistan’s underage workforce and streetlife, relaying the depth of socioeconomic obstructions marginalised children in the city faced, but also coming to learn of a flurry of creative activity being utilised as both a source of income and a site for community, which included welding, football, sculpting, painting, plumbing, handicrafts and carpentry.
“Amidst the chaotic lives that so many of these children lead – everyday strains of earning money, food and shelter, the pursuit of sport, music and art can be seen as a luxury instead of a necessity,” she suggests.
“But there are ways to turn creative prowess into an asset that can eventually address some of those burdens, as we’ve seen happen in Ali and Salman’s case.” Currently an instructor in the Social Science division at NYU Abu Dhabi, Khan attributes the film’s formation to be largely due to the collaborative culture at the university. “I don’t have formal training as a filmmaker, just a desire to tell stories which we may otherwise never hear,” she admits. “Desire and zest can only take you so far. Filmmaking is, after all, a craft. So, I turned to some fantastic colleagues at NYU who were unstinting with their time and advice.”
Concrete Dreams, she comes to conclude, is a collaborative creation by all accounts.
The documentary film Concrete Dreams: Some Roads Lead Home directed by Saba Khan will be released in October 2020.
Lead image by Zadie Kelly.
From the Autumn 2020 issue of Harper’s Bazaar Art