When the writer-director Nida Manzoor started dreaming up Season 2 of “We Are Woman Elements,” the comedy about an all-female Muslim punk band, one among her earliest concepts was a music: “Malala Made Me Do It,” a neo-Western hype monitor celebrating the activist Malala Yousafzai. After which she had one other thought: Possibly she may get Malala, whom she had met briefly at a chat, to star within the video.
She wrote Yousafzai a love letter. To Manzoor’s shock, Yousafzai, who loves comedy, responded. And that is why, within the second episode of the brand new season of “We Are Woman Elements,” which premieres on Thursday on Peacock, Yousafzai seems on a horse, resplendent in a white cowboy hat, whereas the band irreverently sings her praises: “Nobel Prize at 17/the baddest bitch you’ve ever seen.”
Directing her idol introduced on some fan-girl panic. “I used to be, like, completely not cool,” Manzoor mentioned. “However it was joyful to work together with her.”
Pleasure has been an animating power for Manzoor, 34, the assured and wildly authentic creator of “We Are Woman Elements” and “Well mannered Society,” a martial arts movie a few teenage woman rebelling in opposition to her sister’s organized marriage. In a second the place practically every part onscreen looks like a reboot, a reprise, a retread, a by-product, Manzoor’s works (an city Muslim musical comedy, a surreal teenage eugenics-addled motion caper) reliably really feel like nothing else, every a microgenre unto itself.
“I like to simply make the style smaller and smaller and be the one one in there,” Manzoor mentioned one morning in early Might, talking on a video name from her house in Bristol, England. She wore a blazing orange sweater over a vibrant inexperienced shirt and her have an effect on was by turns giddy, introspective, confiding, resolute. Her work resists generalization — Manzoor resists it, too.
She grew up as the center little one in a Pakistani Muslim family, first in Singapore, after which in London. Her dad and mom had been liberal with display time, and he or she absorbed all of it — Singaporean comedies, Bollywood motion pictures, Hong Kong motion flicks, British and American movies and tv. She noticed loads of individuals who appeared like her onscreen, however by no means within the Western reveals she cherished. Planning on a profession in regulation, she studied politics at College School London, however the pull of movie was simple. After defending her profession change to her dad and mom, she discovered a job as a runner at a postproduction home in Soho.
Quickly she started making quick movies, together with “7.2” and “Arcade,” each high-stakes tales about youngsters that mingle motion and comedy. Rachael Prior, the pinnacle of movie on the British manufacturing firm Massive Speak Photos, noticed “7.2” (think about “Kill Invoice” set in a snobbish highschool) a decade in the past.
“It was like a whole shot of adrenaline,” Prior mentioned. Most quick movies present potential, however right here, Prior thought, was a completely shaped artist. “She felt like a unicorn, to be sincere,” Prior mentioned. She pushed her firm to work with Manzoor and has since remained in her skilled life.
If Manzoor’s aesthetic was totally shaped, her politics had been nonetheless nebulous. The heroines of “7.2” and “Arcade” are younger white girls. “I believed I nonetheless needed to middle whiteness as a result of that was what I used to be seeing,” Manzoor mentioned. However a few of her early conferences and affords had been radicalizing. She felt as if she was being requested to both efface her identification or permit it to be exploited, rubber-stamping different writers’ works that depicted Muslim girls, sometimes Muslim girls experiencing trauma.
“That galvanized me, like, Oh no, wait — I do wish to discuss my private identification as a girl of colour,” she mentioned. “I don’t need it to be simply trauma sufferer tales.”
In 2018, after directing different folks’s reveals (“Enterprice,” “Physician Who”) and seeing some tasks stall in improvement, she was invited to make a “blap,” a comedy featurette for England’s Channel 4. Having been impressed by a number of punk musicians of colour whom she had met in London’s artwork scene, she created a brief model of “We Are Woman Elements.”
Anjana Vasan, an actress additionally raised in Singapore, starred within the quick and later within the sequence. Although she was not raised in a Muslim family, she felt instantly drawn to Manzoor’s characters. “I actually do suppose that she loves girls,” she mentioned. “And he or she writes them in the best way we see ourselves, in our vulnerability, messiness, idiosyncrasies and silliness.”
Following the blap, “We Are Woman Elements” was commissioned for six episodes. Manzoor started writing them, which additionally meant writing the band’s music, which she composed together with her sister, brother and brother-in-law. These giddy, impudent numbers embody “Bashir With the Good Beard,” “Voldemort Underneath My Headband” and “Ain’t No One Gonna Honour Kill My Sister However Me.”
A punk aesthetic meant that the music didn’t must be notably subtle. However Manzoor needed it witty, offended and unapologetic. Punk is a visceral type and he or she was excited for numbers that may require the actors to make use of their entire our bodies — even in head scarves, even in a niqab. To place Muslim girls in a punk band would problem the stereotype that Muslim girls are submissive, quiet, humorless. And within the four-member ensemble, plus the band’s supervisor, Momtaz, Manzoor may present that Muslim girls weren’t a monolith, that they might be as various of their impacts and strengths and costume and wishes as anybody.
That’s a severe political level, which Manzoor tends to make in unserious methods. “Silliness is vastly necessary to me,” she mentioned. “And typically it’s an important factor as a result of there’s one thing actually dehumanizing about displaying Muslim girls as not humorous.” However the push-pull between seriousness and silliness is one thing that she usually struggles with (“I torture myself not directly,” she mentioned), as do the opposite writers on the present. They’re conscious that there are so few representations of Muslim girls, which makes any illustration unusually delicate.
A few of these writers felt strain to be extra political, which led to charged conversations and a serious Season 2 plot level that finds the band rebelling in opposition to the strictures of a report deal. The lead singer, Saira (Sarah Kameela Impey), pushes for a extra explicitly political sound, however Bisma (Religion Omole), the bassist, insists that their “jokey, winky” fashion is political, too.
“We’re political simply by present, simply by taking over this area, we’re political,” Bisma says. And by present, they’ll present an instance to others.
Juliette Motamed, the actress who performs Ayesha, the band’s drummer, needs that reveals like this had been out there when she was rising up. “It’s one thing that I may have actually used as a child,” she mentioned, “and one thing which may have made loads of issues make sense to me a lot earlier on.”
The primary season of “We Are Woman Elements” gained a Peabody Award and a BAFTA for greatest comedy writing. Manzoor has since been flooded with different affords, not all of which she finds fascinating. “I simply am led by emotions, which sounds horribly cringe, simply led by what excites me,” she mentioned.
She has a couple of tasks in improvement: a darkish sci-fi TV comedy, a spy motion film with a couple of weirdo twists. However she joked that possibly she may take it straightforward. “Possibly now I can retire,” she joked. “I’ve Malala in my present. I can cease.”
