Why Sannan Saleh left Paramount to make reels in Lahore

A cartoon-shaped view of the world

The episode opens with Muzamil setting the frame for the series he is running — conversations with the creators he has been quietly watching grow on Instagram, most of them based in Lahore — and explaining why Sannan Saleh has been at the top of that list for nearly two years. Sannan’s reels routinely pull ten, twelve, fifteen million views. The point of the conversation, Muzamil makes clear, is not the views. It is the question of what comes after them.

Sannan grew up in Lahore. When Muzamil asks what shaped him as a filmmaker, he reaches not for a film school but for cartoons. “Cartoon Network, Pixar, Nickelodeon, Disney — whatever, man, just give it to me.” That diet, he says, is why his humour is still cartoonish, and why his work tilts toward the absurd. He pushes back gently on the Hollywood instinct to make every story causal. “Real life isn’t really as — it doesn’t make as much sense, you know. Things happen and then later you can come up with ten different reasons why this happened. But actually life is a lot more absurd.” Muzamil offers the show Beef as a reference point. Sannan accepts it.

Duke, computer science, and the long route into film

Sannan did not study filmmaking. He went to Duke in 2017, on a scholarship his mother needed him to win in order for him to go at all. He arrived without a major in mind, hated the academic pace of an American liberal arts week — “they ram four assignments at you every week” — and withdrew from an economics class in his first semester with a W on his transcript. He stayed on the computer-science track until his sophomore year before catching himself: “One day I was like, why am I a computer-science major?”

He had picked up photography because Duke’s campus was beautiful. The photos did well on Instagram. He started making short comedic videos. He eventually switched to the closest degree the university offered to what he actually wanted to do — visual media studies — because it was loose enough to leave him alone. The film class, he notes, is one of the few he never took. “Doing the thing has helped me learn way more.”

Paramount, LA, and the choice to leave

After graduating in 2022 (he had taken a year out during COVID), Sannan spent a year in Los Angeles working as a digital producer for Comedy Central and Paramount. He sat inside an institution he could feel being disrupted in real time. The Daily Show was reformatting itself for vertical clips. The traditional LA path — audition for years, hope a relative spots you in a short — looked, up close, like a 1% game in a saturated market. And the visa structure made it worse: H-1Bs are for technical roles, and the O-1 he would have needed as a creative requires a portfolio he didn’t yet have.

His read on the calculus is precise. “Bro, this is no scene.” He had come into filmmaking from the digital side — photography, cinematography on YouTube, then writing — not from the acting-class pipeline. He didn’t need a casting agent. He needed a phone. “I can just make stuff and I have the distribution as well.” Muzamil presses him on why he didn’t stay anyway, given the Duke stamp and the world’s biggest consumer market. Sannan’s answer is unsentimental: distribution used to be the moat that made the industry the industry. It isn’t anymore. The big industries — Hollywood as much as Lollywood — are slow to react to that fact. Pakistan, where he could go home and shoot tomorrow, looked like the better arbitrage.

The web series that nobody watched — and what it freed up

He moved back in 2023 and immediately put two-and-a-half years of work into a five-episode web series. The first episode came out at the start of 2024. It got no real views. He calls this, plainly, the most liberating thing that has happened to him as a creator. “I felt so relieved. I was like, now I can do anything.”

The relief unlocked the reels. He recalls one of the first that broke: a how-to-defog-your-windscreen premise that escalates into a Star Wars beat. The pop-off was a turning point. He uses it to dismiss one of the most common excuses he hears in Pakistan — that the audience doesn’t want good content. “Everyone knows there is bad content, which means everyone knows what good content could be. The demand is there.” From there the audience has grown, in his words, exponentially.

He spends a beat on the Dunya Digital stint that preceded the boom — a daily-show-style YouTube format he had pitched in through a friend. It taught him to embrace imperfection, to ship something on a deadline, and also where the ceiling sat: political comment in Pakistan carries costs he wasn’t ready to absorb. “I’m starting to become just a tajzia-gar where I can’t really talk about the thing I want to talk about.” He moved on.

The dopamine economy and what reels actually are

Muzamil offers a careful diagnosis of the Instagram trap: virality behaves like a drug, and over time the same hit needs more volume to register. A hundred episodes of a thousand laughing emojis each becomes background noise; the creator zooms out to absolute numbers and stops reading the comments. He asks Sannan whether there is a vision underneath the volume.

Sannan says yes, but loosely held. The first phase was to use Instagram to build a sustainable audience that doesn’t have to be fetched for each post. The second phase is to expand off the platform into longer-form work — web series, YouTube, eventually film. “The vision is there. But I’m completely fine with abandoning it and jumping ship if that’s the more pragmatic thing to do.” That stance — vision plus willingness to discard the vision — recurs through the conversation.

Why Pakistani screens are stuck between two extremes

The conversation turns to the structural failure of Pakistani screen storytelling. Muzamil names the two ends. At one end: mainstream dramas, where a saas-bahu formula has been running for fifty years, pulling tens of millions of views with a story template nobody is updating. At the other end: arthouse films aimed at “DHA Islamabad and DHA Karachi” — Joyland, Cake, Zindagi Tamasha — where one short film is asked to carry every social-justice problem statement at once. Between them sits a middle-class audience of perhaps twenty to thirty percent of the country, with disposable income and taste, that nobody is actually serving.

Sannan accepts the diagnosis and adds an inside view of why the upper end keeps failing on its own terms. The mainstream drama, he points out, has corrupted its own vocabulary: it has a “hero” and a “heroine,” not a protagonist and an antagonist. “When you’ve said this is the hero, it dumbs down the character. A lot of people aren’t actually heroes.” The framing forces every story toward a Disney-shaped moralism. Real character depth — flaws, contradictions, characters who do absurd things because real people do absurd things — is structurally out of reach. Muzamil pushes harder: it isn’t that the imagination doesn’t exist; it’s that the industry’s seniority-and-producer bottleneck means even film-school graduates are being trained into the same template. Sannan agrees. The bottleneck, he says, is the producer culture; the side-step is social media, where the bottleneck simply doesn’t exist.

Why comedy keeps winning, and why that’s not the whole story

Muzamil flags a pattern he keeps seeing: every disruptive new creator with the potential to do serious storytelling eventually converges on comedy. Sannan offers two reasons, in order of cynicism.

The first is cheap dopamine. On a feed where the finger is already primed to swipe, a creator has seconds to capture attention; comedy can do that. Drama cannot. “If I have a character whose brother passes away, and I need to show that this is a sad moment and they had a complex relationship — I can’t do that in a minute. You have to build sympathy, you have to build empathy, and that takes time.” Time is the one budget a reel doesn’t have.

The second is more interesting. Pakistanis, he says, are genuinely funny — “traumatic strike ke saath” — a country whose nihilism is bored. He cites the appetite for unhinged behaviour during the recent war: missiles falling, people going to Daewoo. That base register makes comedy the path of least resistance into an audience. But he is careful not to let it become a ceiling. “I don’t think it’s necessarily true that comedy is the only way. It’s just that it takes longer.” Once the audience exists, the format can stretch.

The four pillars, and why scripts are the cheapest thing nobody fixes

Muzamil walks through what he calls the four pillars of any production: story, script, acting, and production — followed by distribution as the cycle-closer. He argues that the weakness in Pakistan’s system is at the very top: the story isn’t there. Sannan adds the diagnostic that runs through the rest of the conversation: the script is the cheapest input in the entire stack — “writing is free, anyone with a Google Doc can do it” — and yet it is the input the industry deprioritises. The drama is shot on an A7iii with a two-point lighting setup and a generic three-point makeup pass; what gets cut first is the writing time. “At the end of the day, everyone came in because of the script, because of the story. Throw out the director, throw out the actor — at the end of the day, it’s just a script. And the script is the simplest part.”

On acting, Sannan inverts the usual question. He doesn’t think Pakistan has an acting problem; he thinks it has a direction and a writing problem. “You can’t dissect the actor’s performance until you’ve opened the box correctly.” Directors on mainstream sets, in his read, are hired guns reading the script the same day as the actors. The actor is then left in the wilderness, asked to be the one who somehow makes the lines work. That isn’t an acting failure. It’s an upstream failure being absorbed downstream.

On production, his argument is a quiet attack on Pakistani inefficiency dressed up as professionalism. The industry uses HMI lights, sound recordists, full crews not because the genre demands them but because the procurement budget rewards them. He talks about deliberately shooting reels with a flash on the phone, in part because it simplifies the workflow, in part because it makes the result feel organic to Instagram. “The audience doesn’t care about a lot of those things as compared to the artist in you that cares.”

A management-consultant pass at the drama industry

Muzamil offers the analogy he keeps returning to in the episode: Pakistani filmmaking is run like a luxury car company that will only make S-Class Mercedes. The market wants well-made Altos. The Chinese — in his framing — took over because they understood that. He asks Sannan how this gets fixed.

Sannan’s prescription is concrete. Treat the drama production process the way a management consultant would: walk through it, mark every line item that is there out of habit rather than necessity, cut it. The HMI lights, the makeup overkill, the crew bloat — none of it is a function of what the script needs. It is a function of the rate sheet. The savings, redirected upstream, would be enough to do the one thing the industry currently doesn’t do: pay a writer to write.

This is also where his Instagram practice becomes a thesis rather than a hobby. The reel format, he argues, has forced him to develop a muscle the legacy industry has atrophied: building for an audience that can leave at any moment. “On digital content, you constantly have to build that muscle. You have to work on sometimes responding to it and sometimes not.” The film-school graduate who insists that the audience is too dumb to understand his work is, in Sannan’s view, evading the artist’s actual job. “If you have to say it in a way that the audience understands — that’s equally my responsibility. If people didn’t get it, that’s partly my fault.”

AI, hype, and the human craft that audiences actually like

Muzamil asks about AI. Sannan is candid about not being as deep in the tools as he would like. He has used image-to-video to fake an environment for a reel — taking a still of a drone shot and animating it into a car crash — but he is sceptical of the louder claims. He thinks the timeline being sold is wrong. “Eighteen months ago I was like, this is going to wipe everything out. Eighteen months later, we use AI for podcast editing and that’s about it.”

His more interesting point is downstream of the technology. Part of why audiences appreciate his reels, he says, is the visible labour: people notice that the scene shifted, that the location changed, that real props appeared. “If everybody is special, then nobody is.” There is a performative element to human-made craft that he expects to retain value even as the tools commoditise the surface.

Muzamil agrees and reaches for the dot-com analogy. The technology is real; the timeline is wrong. Five to seven years out, AI will be integral to the workflow. Today, the integration is mostly hair and there — barely workflow-changing.

Collaboration in a low-trust society

The conversation closes on the question of how any of this scales. The reel can be a one-person operation. The next step — longer-form, more ambitious work — can’t. Muzamil names the Pakistan problem honestly: in a low-trust society where everyone is optimising for short-term return, collaboration tends to break the moment somebody has to defer payment for a shared upside.

Sannan’s experience cuts against the assumption. He says he has found more people willing to bet on a long-term creative vision in Pakistan than he ever did in the US, where the developed-economy default is that everyone’s time is already priced. The unlock, in his telling, is leadership that signals care. He describes deliberately reinvesting brand deal money into production — water, tents, a clear schedule, an honest seventeen-hour shoot day — because what kills crew morale on legacy sets isn’t the hours but the disrespect. “If people feel cared for, if you’ve told them honestly when you need them — they’re understanding. It’s not that they were humiliated.”

He has collaborated with people he had never met until the rehearsal. The reels themselves now function as proof of concept, which makes recruitment easier than it was three years ago. Beyond the Instagram-creator world, he has found an even bigger appetite among theatre and short-film people who recognise the one thing the legacy industry has lost: that the people on the set actually care about what they are making.

He also offers a sharper read on the Karachi-versus-Lahore geography. As a Lahori, he is a fan of Karachi’s go-getter density — a larger professional class, more like-minded operators, more people doing things. Lahore is still building that. But he doesn’t think it matters as much as it once did. “You don’t need to go to LA to be an actor now. You can make a film in Lahore. You can make a film in Hunza. Location is going to be less and less relevant.”

Pakistan in 2050, with the climate caveat

Muzamil closes with the question he asks every guest: where is Pakistan in twenty-five years? Sannan hesitates. The exponential nature of the next two decades, he says, makes the question harder than it sounds — and the one thing that swamps every other variable is climate. “I don’t see a Pakistan in 2050 if we don’t tackle this seriously.”

If that one variable is managed, he is cautiously optimistic. The post-2024 view of the Western world from Pakistan, he says, is less glossy than it was when he left — Trump, Gaza, the rise of authoritarianism everywhere — and that creates space for places like Pakistan to carve out their own. Pakistan’s systemic problems aren’t a national-character defect; they are systemic. The trauma the country carries, in his view, also breeds the resilience that outsiders consistently underestimate. “There’s a lot of work being done — way more than the gore say there is.”

Muzamil closes the conversation with a direct ask of Sannan as a creator: the potential to disrupt is here, the comfort zone of three-minute reels is real, and the country has very few people positioned to push past it. Sannan thanks him. The episode ends with Muzamil’s signature thanks to Daftarkhwan, where the Lahore conversations in the series have been recorded, and a question to the audience: what kinds of stories do you actually want Pakistan to be making.