Dir. Alia Syed 2003
The title of this film refers to president Zulfi quar Ali Bhuttos response to Indias detonation of a nuclear device in the early 1970s. He promised the Pakistani people that they too would have their own nuclear weapon even if it meant eating grass. This film is a personal and almost psychological inversion of a post-nuclear landscape that spans the (middle-) east and the west. The film fuses, in a precipitous moment, a kaleidoscope of past and present, the personal and the beautiful in colours of red, gold, purple, white and deep indigo. Syeds film-making could be compared to that of Marguerite Duras or the writing of Virginia Woolf. She crafts the film poetically, creating a mesh of five stories emerging from London, Karachi and Lahore. Shadows trigger memories, memories relate to the times of day, the times of day to Muslim prayer. Very much a meditative film that places the beauty of fleeting experience above all else: its joys are not of conventional storytelling.