SHORT FILM - DRAMA

Transitions

Transitions is a personal piece as it is loosely based on a true story. The experimental drama explores the state of being, loss of religion and tradition due to immigration through the lens of a young Pakistani woman living in Western Sydney. Visually raw with its modern day depictions, and ethereal with the memories scattered between. A mosaic of her memories scattered as she traverses the Western Sydney landscape in a state of grief, longing for the embrace of her now deceased husband.

Transitions was shot on the Sony Venice 2 with a set of uncoated Sigma Classic Primes, captured spherically at 16:9 in X-OCN. The pairing was deliberate: the Venice 2's sensor handled the sharp, contemporary register the film's present-day Western Sydney sequences needed, while the uncoated Sigmas gave the memory sequences their inherent halation, flare and atmospheric softness — same camera body, two distinct visual languages.

The brief from Zain Ayub was to draw a sharp contrast between the harsh present and the warmth of the past. For the modern-day scenes, I worked with a raw, naturalistic texture — wide framing that left the lead character Effat (played by Safia Arain) small and untethered against an unfamiliar urban landscape, with overcast or clinical light that captured the cold reality of sudden grief. For the memory sequences — her Nikkah, her Shaadi, her homeland — we shifted to a softer, more fluid visual grammar: shallower depth of field, warmer colour palette, delicate camera movement, additional on-camera diffusion, and two distinct colour versions — cooler for difficult memories, warmer for joyful ones.

One of the film's central cinematographic ideas was physicalising mental trauma onto a mundane Western Sydney streetscape. When fragments of her wedding manifest around her — family members holding a Quran for the ruksaathi, voices calling at her — the camera had to bridge the surreal and the real. Longer focal lengths compressed the background, bringing those memory figures into the same suffocating space as Effat; a tight depth of field kept her disjointed mind on screen, with the manifestations looming vividly out of the soft-focus around her. Open public space, claustrophobic interior experience.

The film's pivotal scene plays out on a park bench at golden hour. The low sun gave us natural lens flares and a warm wrapping light, and I used the dying daylight as a literal exposure threshold — letting the highlights bleed and the shadows roll soft to signal Effat's drift from the physical world into a psychological dreamscape. The film resolves there, with the camera orbiting Effat and her late husband as they perform their traditional Pakistani wedding dance against a sweeping Australian landscape — fluid, cyclical tracking that lifts the picture out of grief and into something like spiritual peace.