(Lahore) The Pakistani Film joylandwhich tells the love story of a married man and a transgender woman, was finally allowed to air in its country on Wednesday, the censorship authority overturning a ban imposed by the government under pressure from Islamist parties.
The film, which won the “Queer Palm”, LGBT + award, in May at the Cannes Film Festival and which will represent Pakistan at the next Oscars, was due to be released in his country on Friday.
The film was released in Pakistan in August by the Film Censorship Bureau. But the Ministry of Information reversed this decision last week, after protests from Islamist groups, saying the film violated “standards of decency and morality”.
In the face of criticism, the government ordered the Censorship Board to re-examine the matter. He finally decided on Wednesday that the film could be broadcast in the country.
“There is no obstacle on (our) part to its dissemination,” Muhammad Tahir Hassan, head of the Censorship Office, told AFP on Wednesday evening. “Distributors can release the film from tomorrow (Thursday) if they wish. »
joyland tells the story of the younger, married son of a Pakistani family under the authority of a patriarch, who falls in love with a truculent transgender revue leader in a cabaret.
Their affair exposes the hypocrisy of relationships in a multigenerational family, where sexuality is taboo, and the clash between modernity and tradition.
Although their rights are a priori protected by law, most transgender people in Pakistan are forced to live on the margins of society, often having to beg, dance at weddings or engage in prostitution in order to survive.
In 2009, Pakistan, a country with a conservative and patriarchal culture, was among the first in the world to legally recognize a third gender.
Then in 2018, it passed a law granting transgender people the right to self-determine their gender on all official documents and even opt for a mix of the two.
But these advances and all attempts to further protect the rights of transgender people in Pakistan have been fiercely resisted by Islamist parties who denounce the intrusion of Western values.
The ban decided by the Ministry of Information had been strongly criticized by transgender activists.