Azad (2017) Reviews

• Great story-telling about a dystopian future world and all its horrors. A familiar world based on current events..

  blacktrixie2018-04-16

  This film takes place in a dystopian future that is based on current events. The main character, Azad, has returned home to Pakistan from the west. He is fleeing from his former position as a government worker and has left a few enemies behind, who are hot on his trail. The plot is clever and riveting as Azad devises a plan to stop a world war. The military leaders of the western government begin to kidnap, torture and kill Azad's friends in hopes of hunting him down. The film parallels the horrors of today's western society and includes several violent scenes to make the audience squirm. Azad was made on a shoestring budget, but the story-telling is priceless. This is clearly a work of passion.

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• AZAD is a film that expresses the tensions raised by current political events, making this one of the most ambitious low-budget efforts of recent times.

  contact-742-5008352017-11-17

  Azad has returned home to Pakistan, after defecting from a covert government agency that targets minorities under orders of the new presidential administration of the US. Azad struggles with his own guilt as he carries with him painful memories of being a minority himself in the employ of bigots in the past. Now, the world is quickly moving towards new order and Azad holds the key to the future, unless his former retainers find him first. The world is in constant change, we know this and have made our peace with this concept since the beginning. But after the presidential election of 2016, it seems as if something has truly broken after a man who ran a campaign based on bigotry and rampant nationalism won the election. There has always been racial and religious tensions in the US, it's the way things have always been, but there was always a sense that people were trying to move forward and not backwards, that there was a sense of trying to work things out and that eventually people would reach a common understanding. However, the new president has ensured that the country has moved backwards, and that behavior that was known to be abhorrent by the mainstream and the common person, is now accepted and even glorified. Hate groups that used to be hidden and speak in whispers are now openly in the out and brandishing their racial and nationalistic agendas. The president has emboldened these groups, and more so than the president himself is his chief strategist who has a clear vision for an America without minorities and closed borders. It's minorities such as Hispanics, Muslims and Blacks that have become the main targets of these groups and a hard-left that has tried to deny that there's such a things as "white privilege" or that preserving confederate monuments has anything to do with slavery, we live in a time when the news media is under attacked by being labeled as "fake news". Not to mention, the fear of being detained and deported (in the best of cases) or simply detained and be labeled as an enemy of the state without a fair trial and thrown into a triple-max prison somewhere. Such tensions are explored in AZAD (the Film) and expressed with genuine worry and concern for a world where white supremacy reigns unchecked and can operate without consequences or boundaries. It's not like we haven't seen the world fall into chaos before, but this chaos comes after a time when people believed there was a glimmer of hope, that people perhaps had left racism and bigotry behind after electing the first black president. Now, it seems as if all these things that belong in a sewer that contain the worst of humanity have come afloat and have taken over. The people who represent the "Alt-Right" show their faces in the mainstream media, they walk around without fear, they have modified their look to become more acceptable, and they are now invited to speak (although it is their constitutional right to do so) on TV and other media outlets, but they used to do so with a collective sense that this mentality was something to be ashamed of, now, it is something that is even welcomed or even justified by some. AZAD (the film) captures the inherent worries and fears that are present in our times, and presents a near future scenario that plays as a warning, for we can't permit the hatred to keep on growing or else the visions shown in this film will become a reality. AZAD is a passion project through and through. This film was made with a shoe-string budget, and first time filmmaker Farasath Khan has made a film almost all on his own. The point here is for the artist to express himself, and express he does. It is often said that in tumultuous times, art becomes more powerful. Here, art becomes a compulsive necessity as Khan has clearly been inspired by resent events to pick-up a camera, grab his friends and make a film with whatever resources he has at hand in order to express his fears, anger, ideas and hopes. This is the work of a man who was compelled to tell a story, a man who wasn't a filmmaker but that by necessity simply became one. In this, his first film, Kahn directs, acts and performs a multitude of duties that turn him into an orchestra of a single player. While Khan is joined by a cast of supporting actors, he also plays a multitude of roles himself, if he couldn't find someone else who could play the role, he would do it on his own. To say that AZAD is an overtly ambitious first effort is an understatement; Khan makes what is basically a Muslim Jason Bourne political thriller with an impossibly prohibitive budget, and he still manages to convey his ideas clearly and with a clear vision of what he wanted to do. AZAD is not just ambitious in scope, but also in ideas. Khan uses his political thriller to tackle heavy themes such as religious hypocrisy, suppression of freedom of speech, racism, terrorism, the rise of the Alt-Right and new world order conspiracies that could become true one day. This is the work of a man possessed by the necessity to create. Art often comes from the most difficult and dark times, for a man who wasn't a filmmaker or that had formal film-making skills, he took a camera and told his story the way he meant to. It is also refreshing to see a political thriller from a Muslim point of view rather than the typical one-sided American narrative. A clear example that every story has different valid points of view. Overall, AZAD proves that it's not necessary to have a bloated budget to make a film, that it only takes drive and passion to express ideas through action on the screen.

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