New York Story, Karachi Style

 

Pakistani director Mehreen Jabbar looks every inch the hip New  Yorker as she munches on a hummus sandwich in a Manhattan café. She is cool and chic and talks animatedly—in rich, accented English.The Karachi-born television and film  director has lived in New York for the past eight years, and it provides the  backdrop for her latest project, a 20-part series for Pakistani television  called “Neeyat,” which means “intention” in Urdu.
The serial’s New York locations, including parts of her own Brooklyn neighborhood, “are a little foreign for people [in  Pakistan],” says the 39-year-old director. The show’s characters wear sport coats and knitted winter hats, not hijabs, as they move among New York’s  glinting skyscrapers, wintry parks and frenetic streets.
But viewers will easily recognize their countrymen in the foreign city’s streets, says Ms. Jabbar. “Everyone knows there are Pakistanis in New York and that’s how they’re going to take it,” she says.
Ms. Jabbar grew up in Karachi, the daughter of author and former senator Javed Jabbar. She says she was shy as a kid and that  being behind a camera was her way of telling stories. “It allowed me to communicate,” she says.
After completing a two-year program in film, TV  and video production at UCLA in 1993, she returned to Pakistan for the next  decade. She made serials including “Kahaniyaan” (“Stories”) and short films,  including “Lal Baig” (“Cockroach”), which earned her a loyal following in her  home country.
In 2002, she attended a screening of her short film “Beauty Parlor” at the I-View film festival in New York. She fell in love with the city and  decided to relocate..
Her 2008 film “Ramchand Pakistani” (starring Indian actress Nandita  Das), which is based on the life of a family separated by the Indian-Pakistan  border, won an honorable mention at the London Film Festival and was also  screened at Tribeca Film Festival.
“Neeyat” is her 12th TV series and is scheduled to begin running on Pakistan’s ARY cable channel on Friday. It is one of several projects she has set in the U.S., including TV series and TV films. For fans of her earlier work, which often revolve around troubled relationships, betrayals and sexual  politics, there is much that will seem familiar.
In the series, a visa-less New York-based Pakistani banker and his  fiancée (played by one of Pakistan’s most popular male actors, Humayun Saeed,  and former MTV Pakistan veejay Mahira Khan) offer to pay a Pakistani-American  acquaintance for her hand in marriage in an effort to gain a green card.
The woman (played by Los Angeles-based actress Deepti Gupta, whose husband Larry Pontius wrote the story) initially declines. “I’m not for sale,” she protests. But the money is too good to pass up, and she relents. And that’s when things begin to fall apart
“It’s a story about good intentions going bad,” says Ms. Jabbar.
Could “Neeyat” be a metaphor for the strained relations between the U.S. and Pakistan? Ms. Jabbar, who plans to become a U.S. citizen, acknowledges her fellow Pakistanis have mixed feelings about America. But viewers, she suggests, will see “Neeyat” simply as a love story.
The director says despite living in the U.S., she still finds herself drawn to stories set in Pakistan. “I really want to talk about what that country is going through,” she says. She is in the early planning stages for a Karachi-based serial featuring a village schoolteacher, and she is working on a new feature film set in Lahore called “Shehir,” or “city.”
But she also relishes the thought of doing more work in her adopted American home. In October, she is set to begin filming “Jackson Heights,” another tale of Pakistani immigrants set in the Queens neighborhood of the series’s title.
“I came here and I saw the world in New York,” says Ms. Jabbar. “I continue to stay because I love the opportunities that this city provides me, and it keeps me on my toes.”