Carsey-Wolf Center at UC Santa Barbara 
CWC Global: In Flames
- Tuesday, November 4, 2025 / 7:00 PM - 9:30 PM (PST)
- Pollock Theater
- Screening Format: 4K digital projection (98 minutes)
- With Zarrar Kahn (filmmaker)
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Director: Zarrar Kahn
Starring: Ramesha Nawal, Bakhtawar Mazhar, Omar Javaid
In Flames (2023) follows Mariam (Ramesha Nawal) and her mother Fariha (Bakhtawar Mazhar) whose fragile lives in Karachi are thrown into turmoil after the death of the family patriarch. When a manipulative relative exploits Pakistan’s laws around property rights for women, the family faces losing their home. Mariam, distraught at her mother’s neglect, finds herself entangled in a secret romance with a fellow classmate, which spirals into a waking nightmare that bleeds into her reality. As mother and daughter confront coercive social forces and haunting phantasmal threats, they must find strength in one another to survive. Drawing on lived experience, director Zarrar Kahn’s In Flames confronts the consequences of living in the confines of a fiercely patriarchal society as the film illuminates the psychological impact of gendered oppression and the difficulties of being young and in love in Pakistan. A landmark of contemporary Pakistani cinema, In Flames premiered at Cannes Directors’ Fortnight—marking Pakistan’s return to the competition after forty-seven years—and was Pakistan’s official submission for Best International Feature Film at the 2024 Academy Awards.
Filmmaker Zarrar Kahn will join moderator Muhammad Muzammal (Film and Media Studies, UCSB) for a post-screening discussion of In Flames.
This event is free but a reservation is recommended in order to guarantee a seat.
Biographies
Zarrar Kahn (filmmaker)
Zarrar Kahn is an award-winning Pakistani-Canadian filmmaker whose works have been screened and awarded in over a hundred film festivals, including TIFF, Locarno, and BFI London. In Flames, his feature directorial debut, premiered at the 76th Cannes Film Festival as part of the Directors’ Fortnight and has garnered critical acclaim and prizes worldwide, including the Golden Yusr for Best Picture at the Red Sea Film Festival and the Grand Prize – International Newcomer Award at Mannheim-Heidelberg Film Festival. Born in Karachi, and currently based out of Toronto, Kahn is committed to telling stories that amplify the voices of historically-marginalized communities.
Moderator Muhammad Muzammal (Film and Media Studies, UCSB)
Muhammad Muzammal is a PhD candidate in Film and Media Studies at UC Santa Barbara. He specializes in cultural authorship, national cinemas, and South Asian film history. His dissertation project examines the auteur status of Pakistani filmmakers, discussing how auteurism can serve as a valuable model for studying the entanglement of national culture and power dynamics between viewers, filmmakers, and the nation’s political history. In February 2025, Muzammal taught UC Santa Barbara’s inaugural course on Pakistani cinema, inviting and engaging in discussion with filmmakers such as Jamil Dehlavi and Zarrar Kahn. Muzammal is also a film critic and regular contributor to film magazines such as Indiewire, Reverse Shot, and MUBI Notebook.
This event is sponsored by the Carsey-Wolf Center.
CWC Global
Media are global by nature; they express culture just as much as they transcend borders. The CWC Global series is dedicated to showcasing media from around the world. This series features screenings and events that place UCSB in conversation with international media makers and global contexts across our deeply connected world.
Storytelling for the Screen
Since their emergence, cinema and television have been in a state of constant technological and industrial flux. But even as our ways of distributing and accessing moving images have changed, and even as tastes and styles continue shifting with the times, our passion for compelling onscreen storytelling persists. At the Carsey-Wolf Center, we are committed to fostering a nuanced understanding of cinematic and televisual storytelling across genres, formats, styles, and historical periods. To this end, we sponsor a wide range of events, programs, and workshops designed to cultivate a new generation of media storytellers, and to help audiences better understand the evolving role of narrative across diverse media forms.