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ACTOR
Fawzia MirzaShabana AzmiSari SanchezAudrey Francis
DIRECTOR
Jennifer Reeder
SYNOPSICS
Signature Move (2017) is a English,Urdu,Spanish movie. Jennifer Reeder has directed this movie. Fawzia Mirza,Shabana Azmi,Sari Sanchez,Audrey Francis are the starring of this movie. It was released in 2017. Signature Move (2017) is considered one of the best Comedy,Drama,Romance movie in India and around the world.
Zaynab is a thirty-something Pakistani, Muslim, lesbian in Chicago who takes care of her TV-obsessed mother. As Zaynab falls for Alma, a bold and very bright Mexican woman, she searches for her identity in life, love and wrestling.
Same Director
Signature Move (2017) Reviews
An interesting composition of Muslim culture, Restling culture and LGBTQ topics
It is a really funny and relaxing film. It really make me laugh. And especially love the mom part, which introduced the conflicts between old immigrants and the new elements. It make people reflect these serious topic in the laughters. Nice work! Also Shabana Azim and Fawzia Mirza really interpreted their roles perfectly!
A Moving Film about Diversity, Romance, and Family
Signature Move was well-received at its world premiere at Austin's SXSW Film Festival. It is a beautiful film. As the director alluded to in her introduction, the film is a lesbian love story between a Pakistan- American Muslim immigration lawyer and Mexican-American bookstore owner in a peaceful diverse Chicago. Basically, it is about everything Donald Trump hates! More seriously, it is about a diverse multicultural melting pot where people of different cultures come together and learn from each other and grow and sometimes come to love each other. The film is well-acted and the script is quite subtle. I particularly enjoyed the performances of Fawzia Mizra as Zaynab and Shabbana Azmi as her mother. The family relationship as Zaynab gradually figures out how to share her true self with her traditional mother is compelling. There are parts of the story that are a little too predictable, but basically it very enjoyable and a great anecdote to today's mean-spirited political climate.
Your signature move doesn't always occur in a wrestling ring
Signature Move (2017) was directed by Jennifer Reeder. It's a pleasant enough lesbian love story. What makes it somewhat unusual is that the two lovers come from very different cultures. Fawzia Mirza portrays Zaynab, a very successful immigration lawyer, who lives with her mother, Parveen, played very well by Shabana Azmi . Sari Sanchez portrays Alma, a woman who lives within Chicago's Mexican-American culture. Sari's mother is a wrestling coach. Zaynab begins to take wrestling lessons. The remainder of the film is based upon the chemistry between Zaynab and Alma and Zaynab and wrestling. The publicity for the films warns us that Parveen's quest for a husband for her daughter isn't played stereotypically. (If the publicity warns you that something isn't so, it usually means something is so.) Parveen is so eager to find a husband for her daughter that she searches the street with binoculars. (Looks stereotypic to me.) However, Shabana Azmi is so skilled that we can enjoy her acting, even if the part she's given isn't realistic. Both Fawzia Mirsa and Sari Sanchez are fine actors as well, so the movie is strengthened by the strong acting of the leads. We saw this film in Rochester's excellent Little Theatre. It was shown as part of the wonderful ImageOut, the Rochester LGBT Film Festival. It will work well on the small screen, and is worth seeking out and watching.
Don't waste your time..
Unless your life is all about being black, being gay, being white, being Muslim, being Christian, being a woman, being a man, etc. you can skip this film entirely. I hope one day we don't need to make art about trivial things like being gay, which shouldn't matter, nor should being black, muslim or however you "define" who you are. But these days everything seems to fall under identity politics. All individual traits and personality seem to be forgotten and all the focus is on gender, race, religion, sexual orientation is what matters now. I don't care "what" you are, but that shouldn't be the premise of a movie. At least it shouldn't be the underlying driving force behind it. Because then it becomes about that, not what each of us do. Besides there are already a million movies that cover being gay, black or whatever. This brought nothing new to anything already made. The film is way too forced, and there is a line in the beginning from the lead saying about something on TV "this doesn't happen in real life." Well, ironically this is what I felt about this movie. The bottom line is that these type of films are really just a tool to seek acceptance. And the biggest issue I have with these "social conscience" films is for the most part they are recognized and celebrated ONLY because of the underlying identity message. It's okay to care about social issues, but don't ONLY care about social issues. I just don't like movies that are didactic. This was just an amateur student film. BTW, if the early bar pick up had been a man doing it to a woman, the same people making this film would have called the police for sexual harassment.
VQFF 2017: Signature Move
Signature Move screened at the 2017 Vancouver Queer Film Festival (August 10-20) and is billed as an indie comedy-drama, but the film's writer and leading actress Fawzia Mirza, who attended the screening, called it a "romantic comedy Muslim melodrama." The film's protagonist, Zaynab (a Pakistani woman living in Chicago) starts seeing Alma (a bright, exuberant Chicana woman). Zaynab's relationship with Alma stumbles along in fits and starts: the next time she sees Alma after their first drunken hook-up, Alma realizes that Zaynab doesn't remember her name, and Zaynab says, "Gimme five to choose from." After being given five options, she picks wrong. A client of Zaynab's can't afford to pay her for her services as an immigration lawyer and asks if she accepts "other forms of payment," which means wrestling coaching, and she ends up training for a ladies luchador match. Meanwhile, her mother watches the world through binoculars from her living room armchair and tries to find a suitable husband for Zaynab; she tells her that she can go to the gym, but says, "Don't do too many crunches. You want to marry a man, not look like one." The concept of "coming out"-an individual announcing their homosexuality to their loved ones and the world as a whole-is inherently flawed. Gay folks decide whether to disclose their sexuality every day: when a cashier asks what they're up to that weekend, when friends ask who they're seeing and, of course, when their parents ask to meet their "friend." The idea of being out once and for all, as if it's a band-aid to be ripped off, is an impossible ideal, and an inherently white, Eurocentric one, too. In Signature Move, Zaynab is not out, and Alma is. This causes tension as their relationship grows and the film uses sights, sounds and well-timed cuts to strike a dichotomy between the two halves of Zaynab's life and the growing chasm that separates them. The way that the film deals with this makes it infinitely more nuanced than your standard East-meets-West romantic comedy, as it questions the tropes we've come to expect from films starring mixed race leads, where South Asian culture is seen as oppressive and backwards and Western culture as enlightened and forward-thinking. Zaynab is closeted, but as Mirza herself said in an extremely charming Q&A after the show, the point of the film is not to present Alma's way of life as more correct than Zaynab's. It's the opposite. "We have to let go of thinking that there's one right way to be," Mirza told the audience in a discussion about the white, Western concept of coming out, and her own experiences with her mother. "It's about finding better words and language to talk about the gay experience." On another note: Signature Move not only finds better language to talk about ethnocentrism and coming out, but to portray the lesbianism as a whole. It lets vibrant, lesbian womanhood exist in a way that often gets polished away for straight audiences-it's sweaty, awkward, funny and unapologetic. Even if you're not interested in the film for its aforementioned contributions to queer South Asian cinema, watch it because it's extremely well made. It's full of the little things that happen in real life: how your hair gets messed up as you get progressively more drunk, how your lips smush up when you kiss. Zaynab's mother has a band-aid on her thumb for most of the film. The set design is detailed and expressive, especially the bedrooms, packed with trinkets and posters. Zaynab's apartment is always filled with the sound of her mother's Pakistani television dramas, which creates a tangible feeling of home. This film was the one I was most excited to see at this year's VQFF, and I can't recommend it enough. It's one of those films you want to thank for existing.