Not Broken

How Not Broken Came To Be

June 24, 2026 

Not Broken started as a homework assignment.

In 2025, I enrolled in a playwriting course at the University of Toronto. For our final assignment, we were asked to write a ten-minute scene. Around the same time, I was also developing my musical My Gulabi Baby, so I was spending a lot of time thinking about character, dialogue, and how tension can be built through conversation alone.

The scene I wrote was simple: a queer South Asian son sits down with his mother and tells her something he’s been carrying for a long time.

When the course ended, I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

There was something about the simplicity of the scene that stayed with me. No big plot twists. No elaborate setting. Just two people trying to navigate a difficult conversation.

The more I revisited it, the more I felt there was a short film hidden inside it.

As someone who grew up in a South Asian Muslim household, I found myself drawing from emotions and memories I understood well. Not specific events, but the feeling of rehearsing conversations in your head before they happen. Wondering how someone will react. Imagining every possible outcome.

I remember my own coming out experience feeling strangely isolated. Not because I was alone, but because everything else seemed to disappear for a moment. It was as if the room got smaller and all that existed was the conversation in front of me.

That feeling became the foundation for the film.

From the beginning, I knew I wanted the visual approach to be minimal. My love of theatre had a big influence on the project. On stage, there is nowhere to hide. The audience is focused entirely on the actors, the dialogue, and the emotional shifts happening between them.

I wanted Not Broken to have that same intimacy.

The film takes place almost entirely in a single location with very few distractions. Every creative decision was made to keep the focus on the characters and the space between them.

What started as a ten-minute classroom assignment eventually became a project I carried from script to screen. As someone new to filmmaking, I took on writing, producing, directing, and guiding it through post-production as a way to learn every part of the process. It became an opportunity to challenge myself outside of marketing and branding and explore storytelling through performance and narrative.