A film may belong to its audience, but it will always be defined by where it came from.

Though I set out to make a streaming platform for Pakistani films, I started losing funds and I could see that I had little runway. Struggling to find a monetization approach, I signed up for a Remitly affiliate program* and started uploading the films onto YouTube with the goal of monetizing the channel and sharing funds with filmmakers as quickly as I could. The goal is to use the funds to compensate filmmakers and re-invest to grow the independent streaming platform.

“Rani” was one of the later ones I uploaded. I then embedded the YouTube onto its film page on the platform. I don’t put trailers on the site, for “Rani” just on YouTube and Instagram. After a few days of some traction across the channel, possibly because I was uploading most of the films and trailers at that time, views started flatlining and then went down. There must have been only one more person who subscribed during that time. I wanted more. After all, I needed at 1,000 subscribers to meet one of the criteria for the YouTube Partners Program.

Besides, if one person saw the value of the content, why wouldn’t others? I wondered if there was anything I was doing in the packaging that got in the way. I thought I was making the content inclusive by not only having the Urdu titles but also the Urdu script in the title. But then I started writing some answers to questions in Quora. Someone asked why Pakistani films were not more popular. I found myself writing about how insular Pakistani films are because of the lack of distribution channels and sometimes the lack of subtitles in films that are distributed as well. I wondered if I was doing the same thing by branding the films as Pakistani as they can be. But I thought that Urdu is not the only language spoken in Pakistan. Not every Pakistani can speak Urdu.

One might trust that the Urdu means what the English says what it is. But it’s a lot of Urdu. In some ways there is a dissonance between what I set out to do and what I was doing. One of the value propositions for the platform was to have English language subtitles. There wasn’t a devoted value prop for uplifting Urdu, even though the language is often associated with Pakistan. The way I was planning to uplift Pakistani cinema was to bring it to the world stage. The reality is that, to do that, I had to use English to do so. I knew that subtitles were important for subtitles, but it occurred to me that it would make sense to promote these films with their themes written in English. Seeing that the titles for Bollywood films are sometimes changed to English titles, it seems that it’s standard practice to introduce a foreign film with English subtitles. Seeing this usually makes me wonder if this practice is done for other non-English subtitled film from other countries, such as French or Italian films. Sometimes, they are. Just like for South Asian films such as “Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham” becoming “Happiness and Tears” and “Kal Ho Na Ho” is “Tomorrow May Not Come,” “À bout de souffle” became “Breathless” and “Ladri di biciclette” became “Bicycle Thief.” Meanwhile, “Mohabbatein” and “La Dolce Vita” remain named as they were and French movies, well, I at least can’t recall a French film that had a title that wasn’t re-titled for the English speaking audience, at least not for an American one.

One French title that did not change was “Amélie.” The film’s title suggests that the story is about a person, which it is, as is reflected in the poster. The only image for “Rani” that would tell the story is one that is in portrait mode and would look amateur in a landscape dimensioned thumbnail. Thinking about how films’ titles often have subtitles that further define the film, I focused on the theme of “Rani,” and so the titles for the film and its trailer were changed to “Chasing social media fame — Short film” and adding “trailer” to, well, the trailer. The next day, the trailer’s views rose to over 1,000 and the film, 500. The following day, the trailer had over 2,000 and the film, over 700. Before changing the titles, the channel views were stuck at around 500 views. At the end of the week, the views climbed to over 3,200. The math from there to reach monetization is a little unclear. I added a Patreon link in case people wanted to express more support because of the film, adding at least some compensation for directors like Hiba, whose films were performing to such a degree.

At the very least, the subscriber count rose to 5 and 2 watch hours were counted (even though the main dashboard indicated that the channel had 24 watch hours, most of which I saw were not from shorts). Another film which had an increase in viewership by a title change was “For the Love of God” which was not an Urdu title, but was titled in Urdu for the YouTube video header. I changed the title to “Christian minority discrimination in Pakistan” which gained some views. I changed it to “Religious discrimination in Pakistan — Short film” and both the trailer and the film gained a significant number of views, with the name change leading seeing the success half that “Rani” saw for both the film and its trailer. The top five countries where the rise in views came from were India (1.600), Indonesia (533), Pakistan (181), Bangladesh (180), Turkey (74). Most were Desi countries and the other, well, the country which coined the word “Urdu.” It was an English title that led to this micro-virality.

One reason the titles included an Urdu translation was because I wanted to give Pakistanis access to its own films. Clearly, it is. I am not sure if the change in English subtitles making these Pakistani films more popular among its neighbors is what I had in mind as part of the world stage a year ago, but it certainly makes the films less insular.

This still makes me reflect on the design of this project. I want to ask myself to think about what it means to bring Pakistani cinema home to itself and the world. I want to show a positive representation of Pakistani people and culture, defining who they are through their own films. My extracting of the themes implicates an interpretation, which may or may not be fair to the whole story of the film. At the same time, when a film is released, it belongs to its audience. From an analytical perspective, I saw Rani, the character, chasing social media fame. Had I titled the film: “Rani: Chasing social media fame — short film,” I would have accurately depicted the filmmaker’s intent of the film while also extracting the meaning of what the film would deliver to its audience in the quick way that YouTube audiences desire. After all, a film belongs to its audience, but the audience cannot change where the film came from. At the very least, I include the film’s location in the YouTube location section, which is shown near the title in the description box. Some videos have Urdu translation of the description in the box as well, with the intention that the algorithm ensures that the film reaches audiences that do speak Urdu.

Should any filmmaker feel I misrepresented their film through the title and packaging, I think it’s worth a conversation on how we should re-title the film, working together to fit the purpose of the project, whose definition would inevitably change over time.

*This is an affiliate link to the Remitly program where signing up and sending a first transfer of $100 within the first 30 days of clicking on the link means a $10 commission. Remitly is endorsed because it has been used by the platform for transfers with filmmakers.