Hala is the second movie to come to Apple’s latest streaming service, reports Cult of Mac.
Australian actress Geraldine Viswanathan, who is of Tamil descent, plays Hala, a Pakistani American teen who “struggles to balance desire with her familial, cultural and religious obligations,” according to Apple.
The film premiered at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival in January, shortly after which Apple acquired the rights to its distribution. It also was part of the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival.
The film was written and directed by Minhal Baig and executive produced by Jada Pinkett Smith.
“The story is fiction but it’s emotionally grounded,” Baig told Refinery29 in an interview. “There were certain moments in the feature with Hala and her mom that are very much lifted from my own life, but then there’s other parts or people that are composites. But in every scene, I would ask myself, Is this emotionally true? And that would set the stage for everything else.”
A substantial amount of dialogue in the movie is in Urdu with English subtitles, as Hala and her parents communicate with each other in their multicultural household.
An “inclusion rider” policy involved in the making of the film ensured that diverse cast members filled 75% of critical below-the-line roles and that women were hired into department head positions, according to Deadline.
“The best part of the film that I like is that if you have a kid [at an] adolescent’s age, you will see the coming-of-age part; if you’re an immigrant, a Muslin immigrant, or [of] any other religion, you will see that part also,” cast member Azad Khan told Deadline. “Coming from a culture and now trying to fit into another culture, you can see that. So, it is going to strike a chord with everybody watching the film.”
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