Yasmeen’s Element: Amman Abbasi is a well-known Pakistani-American filmmaker who made a name for himself following the release of his first movie Dayveon (2017) which won slots at the Sundance and Berlin International Film Festivals. His second feature, Yasmeen’s Element, is among the films in Narrative Spotlight section at the SXSW 2024 TV & Film Festival. Abbasi is also a composer, especially in the Hollywood horror genre, who made The Exorcist: Believer last year – a direct sequel to William Friedkin’s cult horror classic. He was a music consultant on Halloween (2018) and Halloween Kills (2020). However, Yasmeen’s Element, unlike these horror movies, is an uplifting and warm narrative about a girl who has a desire to know about different things.
He has set the great film, which depicts the life of the upper Hunza Valley where four nations collide, India, China, and Pakistan, in the contentious region of Gilgit Baltistan that was shot over the course of a single day. After the military bursts into her class and drags her instructor away, our heroine embarks on a succession of adventures in which she takes some of his assignments but then misplaces them. Her search involves journeys from one village to another in a bid to find his house until finally she succeeds but not without some difficulty. Many local people acted in both sides of the camera which made it also a beautiful landscape centric movie and shot largely with one camera so, tells a story when much else is not available.
Some may say that the film is too serious, overly didactic but this film achieves what Abbasi set out to do – raise awareness about the challenges girls face in accessing education in conflict or poverty-stricken contexts. Instead of steering too far into the quote which notes how the character of Yasmeen is not a happy ray of sunshine spread everywhere but from the beginning until the end, she is in this mode: it goes without saying that this is a feature which lasts seventy-six minutes and is great for children’s stories which is a genre all too often overlooked when it comes to cinema from across the world, Yasmeen’s Element in this respect fits well into the tradition and echoes Majidi’s work which is also very broad and approachable in style.
Yasmeen’s Element was produced by Cximple Production and nuqta films. The film was supported by the likes of Amman Abbasi, Jeffrey E. Stern (who was also a co-producer on Saim Sadiq’s Joyland – the first Pakistani film to be included in the official lineup of the Cannes Film Festival and nominated for an Oscar from Pakistan), Alex Nystrom and Missy Laney; together with Sana Jafri who was a co-producer (Sadik was also produced by her).
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