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Son of a Lion

Chelsea Hunter

  08 August 2009

Directed by Benjamin Gilmour

Centred around a young Pakistani boy’s desire to go to school and spoken entirely in Pashtun with English subtitles, this film is classified as Australian and one we can claim with pride. The Australian crew, led by writer, director and sometime cameraman Benjamin Gilmour, slipped into the northwest region of Pakistan (not usually open to foreigners) to surreptitiously shoot a film scripted with the cooperation of locals. The tale is simple but the insights it reveals about the differences in cultural perspectives as well as the universal nature of family dynamics lend the film a great deal of weight.

Local boy Niaz Khan Shinwari plays the role of Niaz Afridi, an 11-year-old who dreams of learning to read and write but whose widowed father expects him to continue in the family weapon-making business. Scenes of their town, in which the dominant occupation is gun manufacturing, are startling, particularly for viewers with little to no knowledge of this area of Pakistan. Throughout the day and night, shots can be heard ringing out, a constant background noise created by men standing outside their shops and hand testing the guns they have made. Late in the film a mention is made of the number of people injured or killed by these falling bullets but it is delivered almost with a shrug. What can you do? Scenes such as this illuminate Niaz’s desire for more than the life led by his father and grandfather.

Local people were employed to fill the film’s roles and, to the director’s credit, they deliver incredibly natural performances that add so much more to the narrative. “Real” actors would have given us “heartfelt performances” but in doing so the viewer would have lost the sense that they were gaining an authentic understanding of this culture, so far removed from our own — and the film would be the weaker for it.

By Chelsea