Fantastical Visions, Queer Dreams: On “Problemista” and “The Queen of My Dreams”

In the early to mid-2000s, films depicting the immigrant experience in Western society were grounded in realism; the hardness of life as an immigrant was mirrored in the gritty drabness of the film’s visual palette. Mira Nair’s The Namesake (2006), an adaptation of Jhumpa Lahiri’s 2003 novel of the same name, feels emblematic of this visual style and time period. It centers on Nikhil (Kal Penn), a second-generation Bengali American caught between the two halves of his cultural identity, and his parents, Ashoke (Irrfan Khan) and Ashima (Tabu), as first-generation immigrants struggling with assimilation. Even in its most vibrant emotional moments, when the lighting is soft and the camera’s gaze warm and caressing, the film’s visual palette is dominated by the grayness of the sky—a symptom of its largely New England setting—and the relative cultural coldness of American society that is palpable to the outsider. In the two decades since the film’s release, viewers have been afforded only glimpses of immigrant stories that stray from this archetypal cultural and visual narrative. Films including Entre Nos (dir. Gloria La Morte, Paola Mendoza, 2009), A Better Life (dir. Chris Weitz, 2011), and, more recently, Minari (dir. Lee Isaac Chung, 2020) all depict visions of immigrant life defined by grit in an attempt to impress upon viewers the authenticity of the story being told.

The legal and social barriers these films depict make it difficult for characters to imagine life beyond their confines. The late anthropologist and anarchist David Graeber, in his 2015 book The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy, argues in favor of imaginative potential as a balm to the frustratingly tedious systems, processes, and forms that dictate human life. “Creativity and desire . . . are essentially vehicles of the imagination,” he writes, while “structural violence . . . tend[s] to skew the imagination.” Living inside these “lopsided structures of imagination” and the “shattering of imagination that results” are what we refer to as “alienation,” he argues. Graeber cites science fiction and fantasy literature as instances in which people have dared to dream of worlds free of bureaucracy. No subjective experience of alienation in society and the demands of bureaucracy placed upon the individual surpasses that of the immigrant. Two recent films, Problemista (dir. Julio Torres, 2023) and The Queen Of My Dreams (dir. Fawzia Mirza, 2024), feature Brown immigrant characters who dare to continue to dream in a society that encourages them to merely fall into line, who queer the worlds around them through visual motifs of dream sequences and surrealism.

Problemista follows Alejandro (Julio Torres), a queer young man originally from El Salvador but living in New York who is plunged headfirst into a bureaucratic nightmare. As a first-generation immigrant, Alejandro must maintain citizenship status in the US to be eligible to apply for the Hasbro Talent Incubator Program and pursue his dream of becoming a designer of unconventional toys. When the film opens, Ale works at a cryo-freeze establishment as the archivist for Bobby (RZA), a painter who has paid to be physically preserved and reawakened in the future. While dreaming of toy ideas, Ale accidentally unplugs the tank housing Bobby, and though he quickly replaces the plug, he is almost immediately fired and set in a race against time. He has one month to find a new employer to sponsor his visa or he will lose citizenship in the US and thus the opportunity for the Hasbro program. Ale soon crosses paths with Elizabeth (Tilda Swinton), Bobby’s widow, who is scrambling to conjure funds to continue to pay for his preservation and who agrees to sponsor Ale’s visa if he helps her fulfill Bobby’s dream of a solo show. 

Ale is also a dreamer, in multiple senses of the word—he dares to attempt a creative career despite his circumstances, and the visual world presented to the audience is colored by whimsical fantasy and the surreal. The American bureaucratic nightmares deepen for Ale, who needs money to hire an immigration lawyer and acquire citizenship status but cannot legally work and must resort to odd jobs found on Craigslist. His bureaucratic trap becomes a visual feast, presented as a series of interconnected and stacked boxes that Ale must navigate on hands and knees, with no clear endpoint in sight. The visual motif reflects the cartoonish nature of the American immigration system and governmental bureaucracy: systems set up to fail the common user. Craigslist takes the shape of a queer Black character bathed in purple and red light, a twist on the wise and mythic figure that offers guidance along the hero’s quest. A tense phone conversation between Elizabeth and Ale in which the two hurl insults and harsh truths at one another is transformed into a physical battle with them clothed in colorful armor, mimicking a conflict of Arthurian legend.

Ale’s tendency toward dreaming is inherited from his mother, an artist and dreamer who encouraged him to “wish for everything.” Hazy, ethereal lighting opens the film, set amid the lush vivid greenery and colors of Ale’s home country of El Salvador, where his mother lives, serving as an emotional anchor. Through the omniscient occasional voiceover narration of Isabella Rossellini, Alejandro’s story is framed and presented to the viewer as a fable—one whose hero ultimately triumphs over the bureaucracy and databases (courtesy of Elizabeth) presented to him by continuing to create and imagine beyond them. At the movie’s conclusion, Ale and Elizabeth meet again in the future, both awakened from their artificial sleep. Ale has succeeded in becoming a renowned toy designer and organizing Elizabeth’s archaic database system of Bobby’s paintings. Ale’s career triumph reflects that of Torres (the writer, director, and lead actor in the film), an immigrant who has found artistic success, illustrating that, with talent and machination, immigrant dreams can at times come true.

Fawzia Mirza’s debut feature film, The Queen of My Dreams, focuses on another dreamer—Azra (Amrit Kaur), a second-generation queer Pakistani Canadian young adult pursuing an acting career. Azra grew up devoted to her mother, Mariam (Nimra Bucha), and the two once shared a close relationship that has grown fraught with the revelation of Azra’s queerness. Azra and Mariam bond over a shared love of Bollywood-esque romance, hallmarks of which include sweeping romantic gestures, beautiful scenery, high drama, blustery winds, and sentimental serenades. The two women are particularly obsessed with Aradhana (dir. Shakti Samanta, 1969) and its star, Sharmila Tagore. The sudden death of Azra’s father forces Azra and Mariam together in Pakistan for the funeral rites, where Azra struggles with her inability to participate because of Islamic gender conventions. 

The viewer is then magically transported back in time, to when Mariam was a young woman in Pakistan with dreams of seeing the world and living abroad. Kaur portrays Mariam in flashback sequences and Azra in the present day, a nod to the Bollywood tradition of a single recognizable actor playing multiple character roles, as embodied by Rajesh Khanna in Aradhana. Outside of the arranged marriage process, Mariam is secretly courted by Azra’s eventual father Hassan (Hamza Haq), a cousin of her friend. On their first date, they see Aradhana together in the theater and Mariam has a fantastical Technicolor vision of the two of them cast as the film’s leads in the iconic opening number, “Mere Sapno Ki Rani” (“The Queen of My Dreams”). The viewer witnesses Mariam and Hassan fall in love, and after marriage, they leave Pakistan for Canada in defiance of the wishes of Mariam’s mother. It’s here, in the confines of Nova Scotia, where Mariam’s previous dreams of seeing the world reach a standstill. This vivid Technicolor fantasy vision recurs twice in the film—in a scene from Azra’s childhood, where in a queer turn she envisions herself (Ayana Manji) in both lead roles, and toward the end of the film, as Mariam grieves Hassan and imagines them together once again.

The film focuses on Azra’s pursuit of an artistic career, implying that Azra’s ability to continue to dream and create was inherited and facilitated through the sacrifices of her parents, particularly Mariam, whose alienation and difficulty with assimilation are shown in flashbacks. The tension between mother and daughter similarly reflects an inherited state of opposition between Mariam and her own mother, who in the present day is suffering from dementia, mistaking Azra for Mariam and confessing that she wishes she had told her how much she loves her. Azra’s queerness and immigrant background inform her subjective alienation in her home country of Canada, but her assuredness and ease in her identity drive the pursuit of her dreams. As Azra tells her mother in an early scene about Shakespeare’s soliloquies, his characters “feel too much to contain” and “need release.” By the film’s conclusion, Kaur and Bucha’s heartfelt performances achieve this release as Azra and Mariam learn to grieve alongside one another.

While presenting surreal, dreamy, and fantastical visions of the world to their viewers, Problemista and The Queen of My Dreams are grounded in emotional depth and emphasize skirting convention in lieu of following one’s own heart. The protagonists’ relationships with their mothers serve as emotional anchors in the films, providing support in Ale’s case and an initial-foil-turned-begrudging-ally in Azra’s. Ale’s relationship with Elizabeth as a proto-mother figure serves as a guiding force in his ultimate triumph over the American bureaucratic system. As Elizabeth tells Ale, “When they tell you you can only turn left or right, you let them know you’re going up.” With Problemista and The Queen of My Dreams, Julio Torres and Fawzia Mirza present visually rich and fantastical complementary visions of queer Brown immigrants who continue, despite it all, to dream. Two decades removed from the initial wave of immigrant narrative films, the future of film in this continually expanding genre seems brighter and more colorful than ever before, with precedent set for young queer filmmakers to tell their own stories on their own extraordinary terms.