Joyland

The scandal has always misdescribed the film. Saim Sadiq's debut was banned at home for objectionable material, denounced as a glamorised male love affair and an attack on the family. In fact it is not a polemic, and the love story is not really its subject. Joyland is about what patriarchy costs the people it supposedly serves. Everyone in it is trapped, and the film has the generosity to grieve for all of them, including the men doing the trapping.

Haider is the meek younger son in a joint family in Lahore, ruled by a wheelchair bound patriarch who wants a grandson and isn't shy about saying so. Haider cooks. He minds his nieces. He is treated with cheerful contempt for it. His wife Mumtaz has a job she loves and moves through the world with a competence he simply lacks. Then Haider quietly takes work as a backup dancer at an erotic theatre, dancing behind Biba, a trans performer with a fierce hunger to headline. The family, delighted that he is finally employed, insists Mumtaz quit and stay home. One person's small liberation is bought with another person's confinement. That is the devastating structural joke at the centre of the film, and it is set up so gently you barely hear the trap close.

Ali Junejo plays Haider with a bruised, hesitant sweetness that never uses passivity as an excuse. The film is clear eyed that his cowardice has victims. Alina Khan, a trans actress, gives Biba real specificity: ambitious, imperious, guarded, and nobody's inspirational lesson. She is capable of casual cruelty herself and Sadiq lets her be, because sanctifying her would have been another kind of erasure. But the aching centre of the film is Rasti Farooq as Mumtaz, and the last act belongs to her. She is not an obstacle to a queer love story. She is the person who pays for it, and Joyland knows exactly what it's doing when it makes you understand that.

It's a strikingly confident piece of filmmaking for a first feature. Boxy framing that hems everyone in. Deep, saturated night interiors. A sound design in which the family television and the neighbours' noise mean nobody is ever really alone. It's also warm, and often funny, and the title isn't entirely ironic.

It premiered at Cannes, the first Pakistani film ever in the official selection, and won both the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize and the Queer Palm. The domestic ban was eventually reversed after a public fight, and it went on to become the first Pakistani film to reach the Oscar shortlist for Best International Feature, though it didn't land the nomination. Riz Ahmed and Malala Yousafzai came aboard as executive producers.

The verdict: Tender, precise and quietly furious. One of the finest South Asian debuts of the decade, with an ending you'll be carrying around for a while.