Saim Sadiq

Saim Sadiq is a Pakistani screenwriter and director who won the Jury Prize of the Un Certain Regard section at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival for directing the drama film Joyland, the first Pakistani film to be selected in Cannes. Joyland also won the Queer Palm award during its world premiere at Cannes.

Biography Sadiq grew up in what he describes as a "middle-class, conservative family" in Rawalpindi. He attended St Mary's Academy in Lalazar, Rawalpindi. He graduated with a BSc with honors in anthropology from the Lahore University of Management Sciences in 2014. He obtained his MFA in Screenwriting and Directing from the Columbia University School of the Arts in 2019.

Sadiq has said that his filmmaking has been inspired by his family, and by his discovery of a theater community in Lahore that is only a 10-minute ride from his childhood home. and was a BAFTA Shortlist for Best Student Film. He also won Vimeo's Best Director award at Columbia University Film Festival along with the Kodak Gold Award.

For his Columbia film school thesis, he explored the world of trans dancers in the short Darling, which won the Orizzonti Award for Best Short Film in the 76th Venice International Film Festival. It was also the first Pakistani film to screen and win an award at the Venice Film Festival and received special jury mention at SXSW and was an official selection at the 2019 Toronto International Film Festival before being acquired by Focus Features.

Sadiq spent almost 7 years trying to get funding for Joyland. Sadiq credits the numerous rejections of the script because, here were a lot of things that were wrong," and they allowed him to refine the script and fix the issues. Sadiq also had to drastically change the script following the numerous following the passage of Pakistan's landmark transgender rights bill in 2018. Eventually the film was shown in Pakistan, but not in the state of Punjab, where the story is set and which hosts half of Pakistan's population.

Sadiq has been signed by notable talent agency CAA, following the success of Joyland. Sadiq won the Baumi Script Development Award for his script Little Men in May 2025. The script follows a Pakistani-American man living in New York that enters into a fraudulent marriage with his former lover to help her escape Pakistan. The script was co-written by Maggie Briggs, who also co-wrote Joyland.