Maclean’s features Akhlaq Nurjahan

 

Maclean’s published a double issue on May 24 celebrating “Canada’s brightest academic stars.” One of these was Concordia film student Nurjahan Akhlaq, who was recommended to the national magazine for her uncommon talent and her dramatic background.

Nurjahan has lived in Canada since 1993, and attended high school in Ontario. She had become highly politicized through doing volunteer work in Pakistan, and started by taking some courses in women’s studies. Then she went into a film production program, and has been making strikingly experimental films ever since.

Nurjahan’s first film, Flight, won the best student documentary award at the Montreal World Film Festival last September, and earned her the School of Cinema’s Matthew Czerny Award. It was based on the deaths of her sister, Jahanara Akhlaq, and her father, Zahoor ul Akhlaq, a renowned painter, who were murdered in Lahore in 1999. Maclean’s called it “a haunting, painterly exploration” of this tragedy.

Nurjahan will rework the film until it satisfies her, and do graduate studies.

She is particularly interested in exploring the space between documentary and fiction, and will continue her family’s commitment to the arts. Her next project combines documentary and fiction. She said she is going to use some travelogue footage her grandfather shot in the 1960s on his Bolex camera, and construct a fictional melodrama around it.