Nida Manzoor on her debut film Polite Society

The British-South Asian diaspora film has been many things over the years. Coming-of-age tale, in the likes of Gurinder Chadha’s Bend It Like Beckham and Blinded by the Light. Queer romance, in Stephen Frears’ anti-Thatcherite fable My Beautiful Launderette. Unnerving and dream-punctured illness drama, in Bassam Tariq’s recent and remarkable Mogul Mowgli. Yet a deliriously chaotic heist flick, with tasting notes of Western, wuxia, and Regency marriage plot for added depth, and hilarity, hasn’t quite been on the menu until now. Enter: Polite Society.  

This, the debut directorial feature from British-Pakistani filmmaker Nida Manzoor, is a film that – quite literally – has it all, playing with multiple ridiculous genre conventions and amped-up action sequences to tell the intimate story of two sisters, Ria and Lena, as the former determines to rescue the latter in the wake of a whirlwind engagement to their community’s most eligible bachelor. “I always loved genre movies growing up,” Manzoor says, “but I never got to see myself in them. In a way, this film ended up being an ode to my younger self – like, here is a film that has all the things you love, and that you've always wanted to be part of.”

In Polite Society, this takes the form of teenaged Ria and her stuntwoman dreams finding expression in John Woo-like YouTube videos filmed by Lena, an arts school dropout and anti-damsel-in-distress; Bollywood dance numbers that disguise covert sting operations carried out by Lucy & Yak-clad schoolgirls; a Goldfinger-esque showdown between Ria and Lena’s future mother-in-law where wax strips rather than lasers are the weapon du jour. 

“I knew I wanted it to be an action movie about two sisters, because there's something about being a young woman and the pressures and expectations…” Manzoor says. “It’s these small, unseen violences, but juxtaposed [here] with big, bombastic fights.” The giddy, silly heights of the genre mash-up, it turns out, are a natural home for this kind of narrative: for the rush of searing, childlike ambition, the diasporic attention to authenticity and performance, the big bad threat of conformity and expectation.

It was a difficult balance to strike – narratively and tonally – between everything Manzoor wanted the film to contain. Drawing inspiration from the likes of Park Chan-wook’s Vengeance Trilogy and the earnest emotions of Bollywood cinema, Manzoor carves out an aesthetic that is carefully calibrated for a rough-around-the-edges chaos, that would speak to the drive and rawness of Ria’s adolescent angst. “I wanted this to basically be the film that Ria makes if she were to retell this story,” Manzoor says. “It had to be fizzing with energy and bursting at the seams. There is a more stylised, more controlled version of this film where everything's very steady, whereas my DP and I looked at [making] the camera stylised but very punk. It's not perfect, and it's grainy.”

This punk sensibility in the face of both social and artistic convention feels deliciously fresh, although it is perhaps no surprise coming from Manzoor. Polite Society is her first film, but it arrives off the back of her critically revered 2021 television show We Are Lady Parts, which follows the adventures of Anjana Vasan's Amina and four other British-Muslim women who form a punk band. The subversion and defiance of punk is an ethos that keeps drawing Manzoor in; an attraction that, for her, lies in its promise of bad behaviour.

“I think it's just growing up in a culture where you have to be a good girl,” Manzoor says of her interest in punk sensibilities. “I was definitely someone who struggled against that and whenever I did something, like explore the arts, I felt I was transgressing. I felt a lot of shame around my choices, and a cathartic way of dealing with it was to make art about women who struggle but who we also see win. I’m definitely drawn to wildness in women – there’s something unapologetic about taking up space.”

We Are Lady Parts and Polite Society share this desire to take up space, and a curiosity in the possibilities of spreading out and feeling your way through. For someone who found both rebellion and release in making art, it is perhaps no surprise that both Manzoor’s works feature young women caught in the act of creation – whether successfully or unsuccessfully. We put this to Manzoor:

“Oh my god, I hadn't thought about it like that,” she laughs. “But of course. I don't necessarily need Lena or Amina to be famous or get a record deal. It's about the joy of being creative and it being okay, and not feeling like it's wrong.” In this way, Manzoor shares a great deal of DNA with her protagonists. Her relationship with her debut film is one of my pure, unbridled joy, located in the mere act of having tried something new. “It was just me making my dream film,” she beams.

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Polite Society is released 28 Apr by Universal