Layla

I made Layla because I want the world to have an unapologetically joyous queer fairytale. Trauma is so much at the centre of our stories on screen – and our reactionary political climate is contributing to a violent dehumanisation of queer lives.

In the current cultural landscape, it feels like a radical act to tell a story that celebrates the queer experience with unbridled joy and optimism. The aesthetic of Layla is a love-letter to the spirit of drag; the production design, costumes and make up are an ode to the tenacity of queer creativity, of dreaming beyond what is possible, whilst also celebrating the mess of imperfection. In Layla, we have striven to visually and tonally construct an accessible fairytale, one that feels of this world, yet a dream nonetheless.

Within what I hope will be an uplifting film for many, sits a story that explores the conflict between desire and identity. Our romantic lives are often where our deepest vulnerabilities are revealed, and through Layla & Max's romance, we chart Layla’s emotional journey as they learn self-worth cannot be derived from others, and that only by expressing yourself authentically can you open yourself to genuine love, however exposing that may feel.

When we meet Layla, they have a deeply fractured sense of self. At times outgoing, witty, bold - audiences may even be persuaded by their confident drag persona - we’ll soon see how much Layla is willing to compromise their authenticity off stage in the search for love. Non-conformity, though sometimes perceived to the outside world as defiance, doesn’t mean we don’t also long for the safety of acceptance, and the contradiction between Layla’s confident façade and their emotional fragility, rooted in their complicated relationship with their Muslim family, is a rarely portrayed duality of queer expression.

When they first meet, Layla is shocked that Max seems to like their eccentric femininity, but soon it’s clear that he only likes it in private, in queer spaces and undercover of dark. When their relationship forces Max to become aware of his privileges and also limitations, he feels uncomfortable. So Layla does what comes naturally to a queer person of colour (especially one who has to pretend that they are a heterosexual cisgender man to family) - they adjust their behaviour in order to accommodate him.

The impact of this code-switching on Layla’s sense of self is at the heart of the film. We want audiences to feel the exhaustion of constantly spinning plates of identity, and to mirror that in the tone of the film too: blending rom-com beats, with dramatic coming-of-age-story moments, and the lively acerbic wit of their friendships, the film is as aesthetically and tonally intersectional as Layla themselves.

I have long been obsessed with the work of Almodovar, and how he visually builds a world that is inherently queer without commentary. Florists are drag queens, nuns sleep with drag queens – none of it commented upon, for we are just immersed within a queer universe. And I have long admired Todd Haynes, especially for his film Carol, and how he gives queer characters the cinematic grandeur that has so long been robbed from them. In Layla, we were blessed to have queer HODS leading almost every department, and we wanted to build a world that felt almost fantastical in its queerness. The film is a love letter to the creative spirit of drag, and that is what we wanted to show in our filmic choices – like a drag queen is able to create couture out of anything, we strived to take the resources we had for an independent first feature, and to stretch them to give audiences a cinematic queer feast. All of the characters wear costumes and live in locations beyond their means, and each location is designed as an ode to drag – they are of a certain scale that might be beyond what’s possible, and we both revel in that, and also reveal the architecture of these designs, much like a drag queen creates a fantasy whilst revealing the scaffold of that fantasy.

The queer community has always responded to adversity with joy - as an Arab drag performer myself, comedy has been my main coping mechanism to deal with the trauma that the world has thrust on me. Layla lives at this intersection of hilarity and tragedy, at times hopeful yet sometimes cynical, like an ever-shifting queer organism that cannot be defined into one thing.

Thematically, I am fascinated by this link between desire and politics. Who and how we desire can be warped by living in a system that, whether we like it or not, shapes the way the world informs and receives the relationships we find ourselves in. Layla & Max's relationship, though full of surprise, genuine love and intimacy, is one warped by socio-political forces that act as hurdles to them truly being together. Both view each other as symbols as much as they do people; race, class, gender and privilege affect the way they view each other, and sometimes what feels like genuine desire starts to feel like fetishisim, which will ask challenging questions of our audience, who we hope will both will the relationship to work, but also be disconcerted by its charged complexities.

Misogyny and racism have long plagued the gay scene, but both the UK and USA has seen a sharp swell in anti-trans rhetoric in the past few years, and these fractures in the queer community are becoming more entrenched. This film celebrates authentic trans and non-binary representation, whilst also showing how Max and Layla are both victim to the same societal pressures. Max feels trapped by the huge risk of giving up his privileges as a white, masculine guy; Layla fights to be accepted into a system that finds them monstrous, until they realise that the system itself is broken.