The muse can be a fickle thing to find, but Nida Manzoor’s inspiration has always been close to home. “My sister, Sanya, is only a year older than me and she is such a big influence on my work,” says the screenwriter and director. “She’s always been a rebel and I hated to see her being told what to do. She’s become my muse.”
Manzoor’s free-spirited sister has long been a theme in her work. Manzoor, 33, rose to prominence in 2021 with her debut Channel 4 series, We Are Lady Parts, which told the story of an all-female Muslim punk band balancing cultural pressures with trying to write thumping tracks lambasting their daily lives. The Manzoor sisters, who were brought up by Pakistani Muslim parents in Singapore and then London, wrote the music for the series together, along with their brother, Shez . The frontwoman of the fictional band is a tattooed, straight-talking singer called Saira, a commanding presence that Manzoor created to mirror Sanya’s energy. “Sanya is now a musician and spiritual life coach who lives in Berlin, plus she is covered in tattoos,” she says admiringly.
We Are Lady Parts went on to be nominated for two Baftas, while Manzoor won the Rose d’Or emerging talent award. One recent report into Muslim representation, from the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, found that despite Muslims making up 25% of the world’s population, they are only 1.1% of characters in popular television series. Manzoor’s insistence on depicting complex female Muslim characters on screen, and her own presence behind the camera, flies in the face of the statistics. “There are artists who defy expectations, and there are artists who explode them. Nida Manzoor is the latter,” the actor Riz Ahmed said when she appeared in last year’s Time100 Next issue, the magazine’s annual list of rising stars from around the world.
We are meeting on a grey afternoon in Bristol, where Manzoor recently moved with her partner, to discuss her debut feature film, Polite Society. Sitting on a sofa in a photography studio, Manzoor talks quickly and animatedly about the film, which she wrote long before Channel 4’s acquisition of We Are Lady Parts. Also focusing on the sisterly bond, it’s a fast-paced action fantasy that sees teen wannabe-stunt-person Ria employing her martial arts skills to try to stop her older sister, art-school dropout Lena, from giving up her creative dreams to get married. “It’s a sister love story,” Manzoor says. “Told as the sort of film I would have loved as a teenager.”
The result is a popcorn-fuelled romp, combining Manzoor’s love of big-budget action flicks such as Kill Bill and The Matrix with the tropes of a Jane Austen marriage comedy and flashes of Bollywood grandeur. Newcomer Priya Kansara plays Ria with a wild-eyed vitality that veers between goofy teenage awkwardness and intensity, while Lena, played by Ritu Arya, is another shade of Sanya – apathetically cool and fiercely individual.
The slick fight sequences are a highlight of the film. Sisters battle with the force of Bruce Lee, kicking each other through doors and smashing windows, while schoolgirls cuss each other out with accompanying fists flying to the face. “When you’re a teenage girl, everything can feel so intense, it is almost violent,” Manzoor explains. “I wanted to ask why action hadn’t been used to explore the experience of being a teenager on screen, since there is so much pain to express.”
Manzoor recounts a particularly painful experience she had as a 13-year-old recently arrived in London from Singapore and trying to navigate British teenage social hierarchies. “At that age I really didn’t get on with my sister and we’d have these intense fights. We used to do martial arts together and for some reason our sensei [instructor] loved it when we sparred in class,” she says. “I remember one time she hit me, I fell and smacked my face on the wooden floor and all the kids laughed. The pain of the humiliation has always stayed with me as being representative of the violence of being a teenage girl. I knew we had to go there for Polite Society.”
* * *
Music was Manzoor’s first love, thanks to the gift of a guitar for her eighth birthday, which led her to jam with her siblings and harbour the fantasyof becoming “a brown-girl Bob Dylan”. She went on to study politics at UCL and it was there that she became increasingly involved in film-making. “I switched from music to film when I was 21 and Polite Society was one of the first scripts I wrote. I ended up presenting a spider diagram of the pros and cons of why I needed to do film to my parents once I finished [university],” she says with a smile. “I knew I would be miserable if I didn’t try, and luckily, I already had a paid job as a runner lined up, so they couldn’t really say no!”
While she was polishing her draft, Manzoor began writing for CBBC shows, before learning to direct on low-budget comedy pilots. Yet when the time came to pitch the film, Manzoor faced resistance. “We got passed on by everyone and the script went through so many different versions,” she says. “Executives were saying that Lena should be forced into her marriage, or they felt like there should be more misery that comes with a story about brown people. I really wanted to step away from that and just make a love story between sisters, but it made me doubt myself.”
She moved on to other projects, such as directing the first season of Kayode Ewumi’s BBC comedy Enterprice and shopping a new script, We Are Lady Parts. She got more pushback, with some executives asking whether she was making fun of Muslims by writing a comedy, or simply commenting that “they already had a girl-gang show”, she says. Still, it was picked up as a short by Channel 4 in 2018.
When it aired, Manzoor experienced a torrent of social media abuse for its portrayal of Muslim women. “I had to delete my social media accounts, the backlash was so severe,” she says. “It was the first thing I’d made in my voice and it made me feel like I was wrong. It attacked my selfhood and really made me reflect on my socialisation as a Muslim woman in not wanting to upset the applecart.”
When the series was greenlit for a full run, Manzoor leaned on her network of south Asian creatives to help ease the burden of representation she was feeling. “Friends of mine like [playwright] Vinay Patel and [writer-director] Aleem Khan got me through that period. They backed me up when I needed it most and it is so important for new writers to build these networks too,” she says. “There’s still so few of us that no matter what you make, it won’t work for everyone – you have to expect to be torn a new one.”
The series thankfully premiered to far less abuse and great reviews in the UK and US, opening doors to the film studios once more.
“Once we got the go-ahead for the movie I was still really nervous – I had to leave voice notes to remind myself that it would be amazing. It was strange to go from so much rejection to having a big budget and the backing of a major studio like Universal. It felt like I had gone from being the ignored girl who takes off her glasses in the film to become the hot one everyone notices!”
It seems like Sanya’s defiance has inspired Manzoor as well as her characters, leading her to stick to her guns and to make the film she originally wanted to a decade ago. She is also busy working on season two of We Are Lady Parts, which she hints will feature “new characters and an expanded world”, as well as planning possible future projects like an “ancient-Iraq warrior movie” or a series set in Bradford.
“Hollywood isn’t quite calling – I just moved to Bristol,” she laughs. “But it’s amazing to know that I have the freedom to pitch things in my voice that might actually happen now.” And what does her family think of it all? “My parents were won over as soon as I got work at the BBC,” she says. “And my sister was sobbing when we watched the film together – she loved the fight scenes between the girls!”
Polite Society is in cinemas on 28 April
