“As an individual, the bureaucrat is human; but as a collective, he is monstrous”. This is one of the many provocative lines in Javed Jabbar’s ‘Beyond the Last Mountain’, Pakistan’s first English-language film, which was screened privately in Karachi on Sunday to mark 50 years since its release.
A packed hall of invited guests gathered at Nueplex Cinemas to watch the film, which was released in August 1976 in both English and Urdu, the latter under the title ‘Musafir’. Written, produced and directed by Jabbar, the film is set in the early 1970s and follows Hamid Ahmed, a young upper-class man who returns to Karachi after his father -- who is shown having taken tentative steps into politics -- is assassinated by a vengeful political leader. Hamid’s search for his father’s killer gradually becomes a deeper quest to understand his father, himself and the country around him.
But the film is not simply a murder story. Beneath the central plot is an exploration of class, a society in transition and the political and social upheaval of post-1971 Pakistan. One of the film’s most striking sequences comes during what appears to be a flower show or exhibition attended by members of Karachi’s upper class. With no dialogue or clear explanation of their motives, a group of apparently politically connected thugs enters the exhibition and proceeds to destroy the flowers, vases and elaborate floral arrangements. The sudden intrusion of violence into what appears to be a genteel upper-class space becomes a metaphor for a society whose old certainties are being disrupted.
The film also looks into the world of factories, labour and politics, making clear that the concerns of its characters extend beyond the relatively privileged milieu in which much of the story is initially located. For a film in English, and one centred on an affluent social class, it could easily have retreated into a safe and insular world. Instead, ‘Beyond the Last Mountain’ uses that setting to examine wider tensions in a changing Pakistan.
For film and television critic Aamna Haider Isani, the screening was a reminder of how much Pakistani society and its storytelling have changed. Speaking to The News, Isani said that the film “just reinforced how much we’ve regressed as a society; how we’ve stopped thinking and questioning, especially in the stories we tell. Most of them have lost all sense of purpose”.
The film features a very young Usman Peerzada as Hamid, with much of the story unfolding through his conversations with three equally young women: Farida, his late father’s ‘friend’, played by Moneeza Hashmi; Naheed, played by Shamim Hilali; and Aliya, played by Mariana Haq.
The film’s central character may be a man, but its narrative gives considerable space to the perspectives and choices of its female characters. Members of the original cast also spoke briefly after the screening, with Peerzada, Hashmi and Haq sharing memories of working on the film and their experiences of being part of a production that was attempting something unusual for Pakistani cinema at the time.
Filmmaker and journalist Hasan Zaidi told The News that this was the first time he had seen the whole film, describing it as “a great record of the times it was made in”. Zaidi added that “it was also enjoyable to see some of those people I got to know much later in their lives, eg, Mariana Karim nee Haq, who was a teacher when I was in school. But perhaps more than anything, it made me think about how we have lost so much of our cinematic heritage and let it get destroyed with time. There is a real need to try and preserve whatever is remaining of it”.
Speaking after the screening, Javed Jabbar explained that the film was shot simultaneously in English and Urdu, with the cast performing each scene twice. He said the filming was done on location rather than in a studio, leaving the production at the mercy of both traffic and nature.
Jabbar also explained that the production had turned down offers of financing from the state-owned National Film Development Corporation (Nafdec), then headed by Khawaja Shahid Hussain, in order to avoid any possibility of official control over the film’s content and censorship.
A leaflet distributed to guests at the screening provided extensive background notes by the director regarding the film, drawing largely on a book about Beyond the Last Mountain published in 2001, which contained background notes and the complete screenplay.
The leaflet places the screenplay firmly in the political aftermath of 1971 and the early years of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto’s government, noting that “The script was written just over two years after the nation was traumatised and began to recover from the fact that East Pakistan became Bangladesh”. It adds that “In January 1974 as the screenplay began to be written, one could already sense that electoral despotism was masquerading under a democratic facade, frequently revealing a vicious streak.”
The notes also draw a connection between the film’s fictional political environment and events unfolding during its production. “In representing the character of Hamid Ahmed and in portraying his relationships with people and situations, an attempt was made to express some aspects of the political and social environment that existed in Pakistan in 1973 and 1974.”
The film’s approach was deliberately different from the conventions of Pakistani cinema of the period. The leaflet says that “The film sought to portray a specific part of our times (the mid-1970s), the sub-currents, the life-styles, the thoughts, the feelings, the concerns of Pakistanis, [especially] young Pakistanis of a particular class in as direct and realistic a manner as it was possible to do, within the social and official constraints prevalent at that time. In fact in some respects, it went beyond conventional norms and mores”.
The choice to make the film in English was also deliberate, said Jabbar. In the leaflet, he explains that the “aim was to capture the very specific social, cultural, psychological facets and nuances of a certain segment of Pakistanis who use English very frequently and fluently in their daily interactions alone”.
The screening also highlighted the precarious state of Pakistan’s cinematic heritage. According to the director, only one English-language print of the film survives, preserved by the Lincoln Arts Centre in New York. Efforts are now underway to restore and digitise the surviving film.
