Last Orders

More than anything, Last Orders is a time capsule of a particular moment in Manchester. A moment where community came together to create something out of pain. We lost a pillar of our chosen family and it broke many of us. The grief was unlike anything I had experienced before. In the aftermath people disappeared into their own ways of coping. For a while everything felt fractured. After some time had passed, I began having long conversations, journal entries and reflections on how we survive loss and find meaning after it. Out of those conversations Last Orders was born.

The film became a love letter to Manchester and to the kind of friendship that refuses to break, even in the darkest moments. We wanted to capture the tenderness, humour and chaos of queer chosen family. We leaned into the language of the chick flick because that genre captures something important to us: the angst, silliness and warmth we experience as we attempt to find ourselves in the night life scene. We experimented visually exploring surrealism and expressionism to convey the isolation and disconnection that grief can teleport you to.

As a queer, Muslim, British Libyan filmmaker , I make work as my way of refusing invisibility but also because waiting for permission has never been an option. My stories are for those of us who have been pushed to the margins. Last Orders is not dystopian. It reflects the present moment. The brutal murder of Brianna Ghey should have been a wake up call, a moment of reckoning. Instead it was met with silence from those in power, followed by rhetoric and policies that continue to endanger trans lives. This film exists because that reality cannot be ignored.

Last Orders is a love letter to chosen family, and a call to action for everyone who believes we deserve better.