Dil Gali Lover’s Lane Fahim Irshad (Mohd Faheem Khan

Lover’s Lane

Hindi, Urdu

Fahim Irshad (Mohd Faheem Khan)

91 9867688560 | mfkazmi1985@gmail.com

Synopsis

Haider, a successful businessman, has returned to his native town after twenty years to attend the wedding of his niece. As per the local custom, he is given the duty to deliver the wedding invitation along with the local barber - a flamboyant gay man. The odd couple on a day long journey visits the home of Haider’s father’s friend - an indigenous doctor, his ex-girlfriend, a literary snob who is still single, his teacher, a calligrapher, a local tobacco factory owner, his best friend with whom he has fallen out and finally to the house of the barber’s lover where they face a violent humiliation. In the end, Haider visits the graveyard to pay homage to his mother’s grave where the barber is looking for his mother’s lost grave and starts crying and complaining about his personality and sexuality. Haider, who throughout this journey has kept a distance with barber embraces him empathetically and sheds the outsider gaze. A parallel track of Haider’s young daughter looking for casual relationship in the conservative house also adds to the complexities of this simple but layered tale of this quaint neighbourhood that is called Dil Gali or Lover’s Lane.

Writer’s Statement

The real life characters I am surrounded by, hardly find any place in the cinema that I have seen. The travel stories of hills and seas have fascinated me, but I have never seen a film that visits my lanes and neighbourhoods to tell the stories of the people who live in them. So, I imagined a travel story around them. It is a story set with the foreground of love, relationships and marriages- their beginnings and endings, their lingering and their longing. But in the background, it is about my society as a whole that is thriving and transcending but unable to get rid of its old prejudices about love and its norms. This is the story of shedding all those prejudices that the protagonist, Haider, undergoes in his own human way—and in a way that only life could teach so that he listens with open ears.

Biography

Fahim Irshad has written and directed a feature length film Aani Maani streaming on MUBI India. Beside this he has written screenplay and dialogue of couple of shows and films in Mumbai Film & TV industry. He has graduated in Mass Communication from the reputed Jamia Millia Islamia New Delhi.