The concept of Afia Nathaniel’s Don’t be late, Myra is simple in setup–about a young girl walking home after she misses her ride–but the more it unfolds, the more you realize what you, and Myra, have gotten into. This is a film about how men prowl out in the open to snatch innocence right in the bright light of day, and no one is doing anything about it. It is one of the most personal films you will see this season.
Making a film like Myra is never easy, but it is necessary. I had no idea that when I hopped on a Zoom chat with Nathaniel that she would be so candid about how her film relates to her own personal experience. Her film is activism in filmmaking form. It feels like it is grabbing you by the shoulders and shaking you to wake you up.
“This was a hard film for me to make, but, in some ways, it was the easiest since I have been living with this story for a long, long time,” Nathaniel admits. “I was only nine when I was assaulted on the streets of Lahore where I am from, and, as a child, I had no way to express what had happened to me. We didn’t have the language to describe what assault was, because there was so much shame arond it, so much forbidden language. A few years ago, I heard quite a lot of news coming out of Pakistan about these high-profile assault cases happening in the country, and one was about a mother who was traveling on the highway in her car with her two young children when her car ran out of gas. A few strangers stopped, dragged the mother out of the car and gangraped her in front of her young children before leaving her there. The conversation around the country was, ‘What was she doing out there so late at night?’ It triggered me, because women and girls are not safe in either public or private spaces in the country. I cannot deal with this victim blaming and shaming. This story poured out of me.”
When Myra is trying to get home to her sick mother, you will notice that she keeps her eyes down to the ground. One might assume that she is trying to not draw attention to herself, but the men on the street descend on her even if they never see her eyes. They surround her, tease her, and call out to her. One man on a bike gets in her way and we think he’s gone when he moves out of frame, but he is still trailing her. When Myra sees a vendor selling food on the street, we think that he can be someone we can call to, but then we see his hand move down to his crotch. Almost even man seems to be taking pleasure in their torture. Nathaniel wanted our pulses to quicken and our palms to sweat, because, for many women, this is their reality.
“All of these experiences are lived experiences of myself and my friends of when we were growing up in Lahore,” she says. “It was unsafe for girls from middle class backgrounds, but if you were a rich girl, you were in a car–you were in a little bubble. You would never face this reality on the streets. I wanted to play with the predator and the prey visually and not just in terms of the story. I needed to really bring you into the streets as if you were by yourself–you are the prey. That’s how people see you, and that’s how people behave towards you. The statistics say that one in every five girls will be sexually assaulted before the age of 18, and that is unacceptable. When you look at the reality on the ground, you realize what is reported versis what is not. It’s even higher.”
We move back and forth between Myra and her mother who doesn’t know what might be going on with her other children in her home since she is bedridden. Nathaniel cuts her film to amp up the tension, and it feels like she is directing two thriller simultaneously.
“I wanted this mother and daughter across space and time together, even though they’re in separate spaces,” she says. “The mother is confined on a bed while Myra is out in the open street, but they are interconnected and I like to play with that feeling in my other work. I want to feel like their destinies are interlinked, but there is a question of how you convey that in a cut. The mother is in a dark space with barely any sunlight coming in and she’s sitting on a bright red duvet cover before it cuts to the bright street where Myra is navigating a different space, also alone, but the colors are very vibrant and saturated. It’s almost hyper real, and I wanted it to feel as if something might be wrong. I used the palette to create that sense of something heightened and emotional. There’s something brewing underneath the surface, so I used the idea of movement in the frame and then contrast it with the stillness in the home–this tension between stasis and something kinetic.”
This entire film hinges on the title character, and Innayah Umer nabs our attention with how she controls her body and holds herself together. Nathaniel reveals that she was originally looking for an actress in her early or mid-teens, but she changed the character when Umer was cast. The film’s finale, another sucker punch, would not be easy for any actor, let alone someone so young.
“When I was casting, I was looking for someone completely natural with natural body language who is not primed to smile when the cameras go on,” Nathaniel say. “In Pakistan, we have a very tiny industry, and it’s not thriving and huge like in India. The chuildren who work oin that space know they’re primed to behave and act in a certain way when the camera goes on. There’s a whole persona that comes on–I didn’t want that at all. I kept digging and digging and digging for somebody with no actual experience, and in the very last audition, I realized that she was much younger than the character. It was written as a 15 year old, and when I found Innayah Umer, I went home and rewrote the script for a 10 year old. It really became that much stronger with this entire film resting on her shoulders. I met with her parents after her audition, and I gave them the script so they knew what the full story was. She had conversations with her mother and a psychologist.
At the end, when she has to do that difficult scene–and the audience realizes what’s going on–I didn’t want to overwhelm her. I told my crew and sound guys that I was going to do a camera tech check before I give her a specific prompt, and I wanted them to be ready. I gave her the prompt and called action, but when I called cut, there was complete silence on the set. Her performance is so moving.”
When you feel safe after a harrowing experience, you begin to worry that those feelings will sneak back up on you. I wondered if this was the first time that Myra had to trek home or if this was something she always feared. Nathaniel uses the metaphor of bird circling at the end of her film as a bright red balloon ascends into the sky. When a balloon escapes our grasp, we automatically reach for it–it doesn’t matter how old we get.
“When you look up at the sky when you’re in Lahore, you will always see the cheels,” she says. “That’s what we call them–the hawks. They are always circling the sky looking for what they can scoop next so they can eat. The was not in the script, that whole metaphor, but when I was doing my location scouts, I kept looking up at the sky. I really wanted that shot, and I worked very hard to capture that ending in a way where we could see predators circling. There’s something very innocent–that image of the balloons rising into the sky. Sometimes the birds leave the frame, but they always come back.”
