SYARISA:  So hi everyone, my name is Syarisa Yasin, I moved to Australia when I was 16, but before that I lived in a small, mainly like American international community in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia, where I just grew up around so many different cultures and so many different types of people. There were people from Asia like me or had Asian heritage, people from different African countries. Lots of Americans. Lots of Europeans, and just from every corner of the world that you can imagine. And I think growing up there gave me a perspective that I don’t think other people have who might’ve grown up as a minority. And one memory, there’s one memory that I hold super dear to my heart that I think was the determining factor for what I was going to be and who I was going to be for the rest of my life. And that was just, you know, a normal afternoon. Sometime in 2007, I was six years old and I was at my auntie who’s not really my auntie’s house, my Pakistani auntie’s house.

And usually we just mucked around. They watched geo news or something. It’s speaking in Urdu, which I didn’t really understand. But today, that day it was a little bit different. She pulled out a DVD that looked like it had just been freshly outta the oven from the pirating factory, you know, and I’m saying like, this is like, remember this is Saudi Arabia in like the 2000s. So very conservative, no movie theaters. You have to do what you have to do. And she said, today, we’re gonna watch this film. It just came out maybe a month ago and it’s gonna be really special, she said, and I took her word for it. And when she put the DVD inside of the DVD player, what I saw erupting before me was a story unlike anything I’d ever seen before in my life. There was colors and music and dancing and singing.

Full expressions of the full stage of human emotions, right? You know, you start with, coming up, you get a lot of hope in your life when you’re a young person. Then this person, the main character, finds love, love turns into disappointment. Disappointment turns into realization, fear, death, sudden, sudden death of youth, then rebirth, reincarnation, ’cause this is, that was that kind of film from reincarnation came. All these other different things like revenge and vengeance. And finally enlightenment, and if you haven’t guessed the film that I’m talking about, because I didn’t give many details, I’m sorry, it is the 2007 Farah Khan-directed film Om Shanti Om, starring the very elusive, very high star powered figure Shah Rukh Khan. And when I saw that film, I saw a representation of everything I wanted to be, you know, delusional, insane, very, very confident. And even with all the strife of, you know, being murdered, he came back, he rose and he was fabulous throughout.

And that was when I knew who I was, I think. But of course, it’s not always ending up like that in real life. You can feel a certain way as a child and also know the realities of, you know, the situation that you’re in. And how I felt was being a third culture kid, I didn’t really belong anywhere. So the Pakistani kids probably didn’t really understand where I was coming from. I think I was a little wild, little crazy and a little, I think when I spoke, nothing I said makes sense to them, which is fine. And what the Indonesian kids, we got along like we were friends. But I just feel like there was something weird about me that didn’t quite make me like the others. I don’t think I forgot to mention that I’m half Pakistani, half Indonesian <laugh> and that’s really important.

But yes. So I think the main core of what my life was going to be was who am I? You know? I think that’s how I felt, especially in this very multicultural environment. Everyone’s trying to make sense of who they are. Neither am I Pakistani, nor am I Indonesian, nor am I Saudi Arabian, nor am I American or white. I was a mishmash of everything and kind of nothing at the same time. I had spent the rest of my idyllic childhood in Saudi kind of slightly wrestling with this. But it didn’t come to a head until I moved to Australia when I was 16 years old. And I’ll just very briefly put it down of how it was, it was kind of like if you took a very outspoken, opinionated, bold and very self-assured, but also extremely insecure. That’s, I dunno how that works, a Muslim girl and you put her in Anglican, all girls boarding school for the first time and having to wear the all ugliest uniform you’ve ever seen your whole life for the first time.

Let’s just say it was a little bit soul-crushing. Okay? Like it was not cute, literally, it was also physically not cute. But I made it through that. I made it through finally discovering racism and microaggressions. And I, when I went to uni, I took another little bit of a decision because I decided, you know what, maybe this film thing, maybe it does mean something to me. Like it was the only thing that got me through my hard times when I felt so misunderstood. So I switched from having a cultural studies degree to a creative writing and film degree, but I wasn’t planning on making a huge impact. Like, don’t get me wrong, I was there and what I was there to just be the person that carried the stuff to where it needed to go. And I did do that, like, do you need me to hold a set of lights up here for like 12 hours while we try to get the shot? Sure. Do you need me to move and haul a bunch of sandbags from here and there? Yes, I got you. And I just wanted to stay behind the scenes ’cause I didn’t have the courage to try and explain to everyone what my deal was, you know?

But until my last year, sorry, it wasn’t until my last year of screen arts where I decided maybe it’s about time, I kind of address this feeling of who am I? Is anyone gonna understand me? And is it even worth explaining to the public here, you know, what, what life means to me and what my cultural identity means to me. And so two weeks before our, okay, a little bit of context again. In the last year of screen arts, you have to make a big project that you spend an entire year working on. And it’s a really big commitment. Like it’s, it, we, it seemed so serious at the time. And so two weeks before all the scripts were due, ’cause a bunch of scripts would go into the running that students could write and they would be voted in or voted out, I hastily wrote a very, very, very rough script, submitted it, and lo and behold, for whatever reason, call it fate, call it destiny, it was accepted.

And that was my first feeling of, well, I’ve already towed the line, I might as well jump over it. And so what I had written was a little short film called The Eyes of Gosh. And the story behind this film was about a Pakistani Australian woman, you know, second generation woman, young woman like myself, who runs away on the day of her wedding when she realizes that her vision of the future didn’t align with marrying this guy. This guy was her best friend since childhood. They had always had like sort of a thing for each other, but she suddenly got the feeling of, I wanna find something a little bit more. I wanna have an adventure, you know, as, as all human beings want to do. So she steals a car and she runs away in the day of her wedding. And as she’s driving in this stolen car, barefoot, you know, after running through <laugh> a wedding venue with a heavy red wedding dress, she suddenly sees something twinkle in the back of the car.

And she’s like, what is that? She turns around to look at it and there’s a little glint of metal that is actually a sheriff’s badge. And she keeps turning towards the road until it keeps glinting. And the next second she turns around the she’s badge is being worn by a Pakistani woman clad in fringe and a cowboy hat and a gorgeous gold [inaudible word] wearing the sheriff’s badge and wom. It was the ghost of her mother who had passed away trying to reign in her bandit, her bandito of a child after making sort of, let’s just say a little bit of a rash decision, right? But I don’t blame her. And the whole story was about, you know, kind of trying to find that reckoning with yourself, your family and your culture, knowing that you love and embrace your family and your culture, but also trying to balance who you are and find who you are within it.

And I didn’t know it at the time, and I know it seems extremely obvious, but it really was just a, a ground for me to even just express these things that I was feeling in myself, perhaps self-imposed, but you know, that’s what it was. But the world is not idyllic. And even though I got the script accepted and everything was a handy dandy, I wasn’t really, I don’t think I was ready and prepared for how the world saw brown people versus how I saw myself. You know, I think my story was perceived by the institution, my teachers, even well-meaning people as being a very black and white, very simple tale of escaping from your oppressive culture. Like it really did feel like that they kept on trying to make the parents really angry and forceful, you know, like the stern, super strict father, the elusive and like oppressive but silent fiance, which was not true at all.

It was actually quite goofy, which I love. Like the very strict but also overbearing mother, you know, this is all what they saw of us. And I was horrified. I was like, oh, that’s not how it is at all. She’s like this because this is like this. She’s reacting that way because this is how human beings react in any given situation, you know? And that reality was very difficult to deal with. And plus all the sleep depression, all the all-nighters you have to pull, shooting a film is one of the hardest things you can take on yourself. And I felt so broken. I felt this attempt to try and express who I am, to find who I am is being rejected by the people, the very people who have the power to give it, you know, some legitimacy. But it wasn’t until, you know, this was, I’m gonna take you back to one of the last days of our shoot.

We spent most of the shoot in the outdoors because it was a road film, you know, stolen car, driving through all these kind of like remote areas, western cowboys, et cetera. And we finally were shooting indoors in a hotel. And the whole crew, you could just see were slumped and exhausted and just wanted to get it over with. But it wasn’t until the main actor who was playing the bride’s father, his name is Ashish, left us a note after he left the set after he was done wrapped for the day. And that note and his words kind of changed everything. We were all so unbelievably changed by it. What he had written was something along the lines of, I’ve had this dream to act ever since I was a child. And it never went away, even though I knew I couldn’t achieve it at that age.

But now that I’m over 50, I finally got the chance to become kind of who I always saw myself as. And that’s thanks to people like you and to people who give me the chance to embrace this. And we were so, so tired and so emotional, we all just started crying. It was such a thing. And in that moment, I think I learned who I was and I think I learned what my dream really was. Even if my one dream couldn’t be achieved, dreams don’t come true all at once, you know, it happens in little small moments to in through everyone’s achievements and everyone’s feelings of just being seen and recognized. So a month later at the awards show for the films that were created from the cohort, we didn’t win any awards, like nothing significant. We only won Best Sound design, which I mean, shout out to Sam, my sound designer, she really did eat that.

But nothing from script directing, nah, no one was a fan, I don’t think. But again, when I left the theatre room, even when I was feeling at my most ejected, I saw my actors standing proudly together, all gleaming with the achievement that they had achieved. You know, Ashish playing the father, Ellie playing the mother, the cowboy ghost, and the main character as well. Just everyone was gleaming with pride. And that’s when I really found that even if people couldn’t recognize me, I made these people at least for once, also feel that they were recognized. They were the main characters. They weren’t caricatures, they were real people and they were the star. And from what I’ve learned, I think I can attribute it back everything to the film I watched. And at one fateful day in 2007, which has this saying, just like in our films, in our lives, everything has to end up in a satisfactory way at the end.

Aaj iss baat ka bhi yakeen ho gaya ki humari filmon ki tarah humari zindagi mein bhi end mein sab kuch theek ho jaata hai. Happy Endings. Aur agar theek na ho toh woh the end nahin hai dosto, picture abhi baaki hai.

[Translation: Today I have realized that just like our films, in our lives everything also becomes fine in the end. Happy Endings. And if it doesn’t, then that’s not the end friends, the picture isn’t over yet.]