Why Pakistani creators can't afford to take a risk

North Carolina to Karachi, with no memory in between

The episode opens with Muzamil welcoming Ghazanfer Jaffery to the Dubai studio after what he describes as a three-year attempt to make the recording happen — first in Islamabad, now finally in the city both of them have moved to. Sami, Ghazanfer’s Bekaar Films co-founder, had been on the show one episode earlier. This is the companion conversation.

Ghazanfer was born in Karachi but moved to Durham, North Carolina with his family at around eighteen months old. He grew up there entirely — kindergarten through high school — in what he describes as a suburban area not unlike Islamabad, with four seasons, trees, and mountains. North Carolina, he points out, is the rare US state where you can drive from mountains to beach inside the same border.

Schooling was largely fine, but the conversation flags 2001 as the inflection. “Racism toh nahi tha, but obviously after 2001 thora sa milta tha,” he says. North Carolina is a red state, and after 9/11, in pockets of it, being Pakistani and Muslim drew the predictable script from people who had no other reference point. He shrugs it off as not particularly heavy.

He came back to Karachi in 2008, eight months after graduation. He had no memories of Pakistan and no real vision of it. His parents and older brother told him the arts had no future and steered him into computer science and telecommunications at FAST. One year later his GPA was a 1.7. “Coding was difficult, bro. C sharp and all that. Was not my forte.” Maths and art, he concluded, do not go together. He switched to the university’s newly launched College of Media Arts, started in graphic design, and ended up majoring in film with a minor in design.

How Bekaar Films actually started

Muzamil asks for the origin story from Ghazanfer’s side of the table. The year was 2013. He was in his final year; Sami was one semester behind. The two of them had been in enough shared classes and group projects to develop a working understanding.

The pitch to themselves was simple: after graduation, everyone in the group would be working for someone else — a boss, a client, an agency. The films they had learned to make would have nowhere to go. So they decided to come together on weekends and shoot whatever they wanted. They wrote it, acted in it, edited it, and uploaded it. One of the early skits went viral. People started watching. They kept going.

At the time, Ghazanfer was working as a producer at Saatchi & Saatchi, where the agency had just won the Pepsi bid. Sami was an assistant director on the feature film Maalik. Bekaar Films lived in the weekend gap. Ghazanfer walks through the producer role with some precision — gathering three director bids, sitting in pre-production meetings, managing locations, casting, wardrobe, sets, post-production, and client approvals through to final release — because that grammar is what Bekaar Films would later borrow.

The first eighty thousand rupees

The first paid Bekaar Films project came in 2015 — a four-video brief for eighty thousand rupees. At the time, Ghazanfer’s monthly salary at the agency was fifty thousand. “We’ve been crazy,” he says. “We went bonkers. Like, let’s do the project.” The brand was Sprite, which sat awkwardly alongside the agency’s freshly won Pepsi account. His boss called him in. Ghazanfer pointed out that his face was not on camera and his contract did not bar it. The boss let it go.

Muzamil presses on a quieter consequence: the shift from a private person to a recognisable one. Ghazanfer is direct that before Bekaar Films he was a quiet kid who hated presenting to a classroom. The comedy work killed that. “Fifteen years ago I wouldn’t be able to do this,” he says — sitting down for a podcast. Initially being recognised was a pleasure. After three to five years it stopped being one. The COVID masks, he admits, were a relief. “Ammi bolti hai beta jao dahi lekar aao. Main kaise loonga? Are woh dahi lekar aa raha hai apne ammi ke liye.”

Muzamil layers on his own version of the same point — the brand calcifies, and the moment you try to step out of the lane the comments push you back in. Ghazanfer agrees: “Aap jitni bhi serious ho jaao, hamare aapko dekh ke hansi aayegi.” A serious post in a leather jacket got the same response. The audience has welded his face to comedy and is not letting it move.

Putting a child online, and what Devin and the piano kid imply

The two of them spend a long stretch on the question of whether to put a young child into public life. Ghazanfer kept his son Eesa offline for the first six months. He acknowledges the case against: it isn’t the child’s choice, the child has to be more careful than other kids, ten extra pairs of eyes are on every mistake. He acknowledges the case for: both parents do this work, family content is part of the life they live, and the child gets to decide later.

Muzamil’s framing is evolutionary. Historically, parents passed down whatever skill or opening they had so the next generation got a fighting chance. He cannot stop his son from being a public figure if that’s what he chooses, but giving him an early platform may be the most honest version of what every parent has always done.

The conversation widens. Muzamil pulls up two clips — a child who can do multiplication and division before the age of three, and a five-year-old performing Mozart after starting piano at three with four-hour daily lessons during COVID. Ghazanfer’s read is the one developmental psychologists would recognise. Two to five is the absorbent window. A child at that age will pick up notes, numbers, or language with a speed adults forget. “What they did is very smart. Piano at the age of three, very smart, because that’s where the child picks up and he repeats it over and over again.”

Muzamil names the tension: every parent who watches those clips wonders if they are robbing their kid by not doing the same, and at the same time wonders if running the drill at all is a small theft of childhood. Michael Jackson is the example that surfaces — a man whose entire adult life was a reconstruction of the years his father had taken from him. They land roughly where most thinking parents land: it’s an opportunity cost, both directions cost something, and no one has the clean answer.

Why they left Karachi

Eight months before the recording, Ghazanfer moved his family to Dubai. Muzamil asks why. The answer is unsentimental and worth quoting at length, because it is the cleanest articulation of the diaspora calculus on the show in some time.

“When you get married and when you start a family, you not only think about yourself, you think about the family.” The first reason is safety. In Dubai, if his wife Ridda needs to take Eesa downstairs at three in the morning to a twenty-four-hour shop, he does not think about it. In Karachi, he says, you cannot do that — and you would not stop thinking about it. The mental tax of not knowing when the bike will pull up alongside the car at a traffic light is constant.

The second reason is infrastructure. Electricity, water, gas. The same problems he has been watching since he came back in 2008. He describes a recent trip back to Karachi, in November: Eesa was hungry, Ridda offered to cook, the gas was not running. “Kyon humein yeh raat ke ek baje Bahadurabad jana pad raha hai?” he asks. Why is a basic utility, in 2024, still an open question?

He notes — and Muzamil agrees — that the line shifts the moment children enter. From 2008 to 2016, he could absorb the city. After Eesa, he could not. “It’s sad, apna mulk hai. But jo circumstances hain, aapko pata hai."

"Defeatist attitude hai, chhod kar chale gaye”

The leaving-Pakistan conversation cracks open the longer-running grievance both men want to air: the way Pakistanis at home talk to Pakistanis who leave. Muzamil draws the contrast with India, which celebrates its overseas residents and has watched them become CEOs of Google, Microsoft, and the United Kingdom. He brings up Vivek Ramaswamy and Nikki Haley in the 2024 US race as evidence of a country that exports its people on purpose. Pakistan, he says, does the opposite — when a Pakistani goes global, the instinct at home is to pull them back into the well.

Ghazanfer offers his read, with the caveat that it is from personal experience and may be wrong. “Pakistanis they love leg pulling on each other — usne kaise kar liya, woh kyon aage nikal gaya, yeh kyon kar raha hai. From my experience I’ve seen Indians support each other. They’re more supportive to each other rather than Pakistanis to Pakistanis.”

When he told fellow Pakistanis he was moving to Dubai, the responses he got were not congratulations. They were projection. “Kya karoge wahan jaake? Yahan par accha bhala chal raha hai. Itna mehnga hai wahan. Kaise survive karoge?” Muzamil’s framing is sharper still: in dollar terms, none of them were the global somebody they thought they were in Karachi. The bruise from those conversations is less about the move and more about being told the move wasn’t allowed.

The audience is the algorithm

The discussion drifts to the comment culture — and specifically the difference between how a Pakistani family reel is received versus a Western one. Ghazanfer’s lived version of this is “Baby ko naqab kyon nahi karaya?” under content that would draw nothing but emojis on a white creator’s account.

Muzamil names the contradiction at the centre of it. The same audience that publicly disapproves of Ducky Bhai and Maaz Safder for “selling” their families is the audience delivering the millions of views. “Unko millions of views aap de rahe ho. 3 million views aap de rahe ho. Phir end of the day unko bura bhi bolna hai aapko.” Ghazanfer’s framing of the same point is shorter: if you have a problem with someone showing their family, don’t watch. The market signal and the moral complaint are coming from the same hand.

The two of them also push back on the expectation that public figures should simply absorb whatever the internet throws at them. Muzamil draws the line cleanly. “Nobody is evolved to a point where they can hear thousands of people say shit about them. Aap usko sociopath bana sakte ho. That is actually sociopathy, jismein aap apne emotions ko completely maar doge. Aur phir jab aap maar doge aur aap ek robot ki tarah saamne aaoge, phir woh aakar kahenge yaar authenticity nahi hai.” It is the cleanest answer he has given on the show to the standard “you signed up for it” reply.

The smaller, related grievance is the entitlement around the Stripe link Muzamil keeps below his videos. Patreon and creator support are global norms; in Pakistan, asking the audience to optionally contribute draws comments calling it begging. He notes that the same audience would happily watch his content from Dubai for free without ever asking how the cost structure works.

Why Pakistan still has no web series

Muzamil shifts the conversation to the question he has now put to multiple Bekaar Films members: why has the web series moment in Pakistan still not arrived? If anyone was going to break it open, he says, he assumed it would be them.

Ghazanfer’s first answer is money. Pakistani sponsors are afraid to put serious budget behind a web series because the format has no track record locally. India is years ahead because the producers there are willing to write the cheque.

Muzamil pushes back with numbers. Pakistani TV dramas, he points out, now live on YouTube — and the daily uploads that hit ten million views per episode imply something close to eight thousand dollars in ad revenue per episode at current CPMs. That is roughly twenty lakh rupees per episode for a network drama running on the same platform an independent creator would use. The business case, he argues, exists. What’s missing is creators willing to compete with TV drama scale rather than benchmarking against their own old comedy uploads.

The two of them then try to size the project honestly. A twelve-episode high-school drama at thirty minutes an episode, Ghazanfer estimates, would cost at minimum one crore — roughly eight and a half lakh per episode. He thinks Netflix-level quality is achievable inside that budget if the connections are right.

The story problem and the censor problem

Muzamil’s next claim is that the bottleneck isn’t only budget — it’s stories. Pakistani television defaults to a standardised emotional grammar: poor girl, rich boy, joint family, sasural. The shows the two of them grew up loving were Suits and Breaking Bad. The space between is empty.

Ghazanfer’s pushback is the censor problem. Hollywood and Bollywood let you go places that Pakistani sensor boards will simply ban. But he agrees that web is a different distribution, and that murder mysteries — to take one example — barely exist in a country where the source material runs in the newspaper every morning. They both flag the YouTube channel Raftar as a sign of life: a team doing detailed long-form storytelling on subjects like the Lyari gang war, which “in itself is worth a movie.”

Muzamil’s diagnosis is sharp. The trained filmmakers are too risk-averse; the kids who will take risks don’t have the craft. “You get Midsummer Chaos. Where that risk is just through the roof but the quality is just down the drain.” Bekaar Films, MooRoo, and a handful of others are the right hands to make the leap — they have the experience and the YouTube fluency — but no one has yet.

Ghazanfer’s read on why is structural. The producers know the audience will reward the same recycled drama, and so the money keeps flowing back to it. “Paise banane hain. Jab aap paise laga rahe ho, paise aane wapas.” The first three attempts at something new will lose money. The fourth will return ten times. No one in Pakistan is currently willing to fund the first three.

The investor model that doesn’t exist yet

Muzamil tries to construct the deal aloud. If he were an investor today, what would the arrangement actually look like? The opacity of YouTube revenue makes a standard TV-style ROI calculation impossible. Bekaar Films would need to show a transparent per-series revenue stream to give a backer confidence the money could come back.

Ghazanfer’s counter is that no serious investor would put a crore behind a single web series. He would split a crore across three different scripts — comedy, horror, murder mystery — treat the first one as the experiment, and give the investor a transparent monthly share of the YouTube ad revenue across all three.

The harder fact underneath this, which Muzamil names, is that there is currently no Pakistani Netflix original. Neither of them knows anyone who has had a serious conversation with the platform about commissioning local content. Bekaar Films has had a series picked up by Turkish Airlines, but that’s the ceiling.

Ten years out — and the same fight everyone is having

Muzamil closes the recording at the ninety-minute mark with a question Ghazanfer says he hasn’t actually sat with. Ten years from now, where does he want to be?

Not Dubai. He is direct about that. He sees the long-term move as West — Europe, Canada, the US — partly for the opportunities, partly for the platform mechanics. Instagram monetisation, YouTube monetisation, TikTok monetisation, Facebook monetisation — every one of those programs launched first in the United States. The reels Bekaar Films makes that hit a million views earn nothing on Instagram because of where the company is registered. The same reels uploaded from Brooklyn would have paid.

Muzamil raises the deeper question: if you go West, do you build a new identity for a Western audience? Or do you double down on the overseas Pakistani and overseas desi market, which between the Pakistani and Indian diasporas is already larger than several European countries combined? Ghazanfer’s honest answer is that everyone wants to be a global influencer, but he is still working out what version of his content can travel. “I’m working day and night, trying to figure it out.”

Muzamil names the meta-condition. He had the same conversation with Danish Ali. Every Pakistani creator who has moved out is having the same internal argument right now, and all of them are waiting for one of them to break the equation first. “Koi na koi usko karega. At least jo purane wale hain, we have that sort of a vibe ke hamara group bhi hai, hum aapas mein woh share kar lete hain.” Whichever one of them cracks it, the rest will follow.

By the end of the conversation, the question Ghazanfer leaves on the table is one a generation of Pakistani creators is now sitting with: how do you make content that speaks globally without losing the audience that made you in the first place? Neither of them claims to have the answer. They are both, by their own admission, still inside the problem.