A Ticket To Paradise

In Pakistan a young man wins tickets to Medina on a gameshow, which he hopes to use to fulfil his parents’ lifelong dream of completing the pilgrimage of Umrah.

Siraj has struck it lucky. He has entered a television gameshow and won two tickets to Medina as a result. Siraj thinks that he can finally give his parents what they have always wanted, a way to conduct the pilgrimage of Umrah, by giving them the tickets and sending them on their merry way without the crippling cost which would normally be involved. There’s only one problem – Siraj and his family are considered ‘illegal’, and as such have no identity cards or passports, nor do they have any way of obtaining them.

In his hurry to provide for his parents, Siraj solicits advice from his best friend Saleem, who tells him of a forger that could help out with the document situation. This, however, will elicit an enormous cost in and of itself, and so Siraj must go cap in hand to his boss to ask for the money to pay for this service. His boss, a shrewd but not unkind man, offers to help, but in return he asks for Siraj’s ‘ancestral’ boat as collateral. The boat has sat in the harbour for a long time without being taken to sea, as it used to belong to his brother who was lost on the waves years before. Nobody in the family is happy about this idea, but Siraj sees it as the only way to give his parents what they want, and can’t see the point in letting the boat rot away without anyone to sail in her.

As Siraj weighs up the cost of his parents’ spiritual salvation, and what the family may lose in return, he must search his own conscience and test his own faith to decide what he holds most dear. Director and co-writer Awais Hameed helps us through Siraj’s story, mixing between interior shots of the family home and open seascape down by the harbour. Siraj’s life certainly seems pulled in two directions, and Hameed shows us some good scenes with some quality photography in both sections. Getting into the story of Siraj’s situation is easy, and his continued motivation, even in the face of obvious tragedy, carries the engagement of the audience all the way to the end.

At seventeen-minutes, A Ticket To Paradise takes the time to tell it’s story properly. There’s enough space for all the necessary relationships and conversations to have meaning, and there’s some nice cinematography along the way. On the surface, A Ticket To Paradise may seem to have some basic motivations and archetypal conflict, but underneath the simplistic narrative lies some powerful imagery as well as a deeper message which really comes through in how the story turns out.

There’s a little more than meets the eye at first glance, and if you decide to buy A Ticket To Paradise, you’ll find a genuine film which tries to deliver on what it promises.