Interview: Naqqash Khalid on ‘In Camera’
It’s hard to believe In Camera is a directorial debut. Stylistically assured, bold in its choices, and blistering in its critique of representation politics and capitalist assimilation, Naqqash Khalid‘s first feature plays like the work of someone who’s been at it for decades. The film is as tightly constructed as it is thematically expansive, cutting into the British film industry with surgical precision while following one young man’s quiet, spiraling collapse into disassociation.
That being said, it’s even harder to believe that Khalid does not come from a filmmaking background. “I wrote In Camera outside of the film industry. I was a lecturer. I didn’t know anybody who worked in film,” he recalls. “Then I entered the industry and it was this weird meta experience. I wrote In Camera, and then In Camera happened to me. And it continues to happen.”
Khalid is speaking of his experience embarking on a festival and press tour for the film, starting from its world premiere at at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival on July 1, 2023 and culminating in the film’s US release almost 2 years later, in April 2025. In a way, his journey almost mirrors that of his lead character; two people breaking into an industry and a space that gatekeeps instead of welcomes. A reverse, twisted fairytale, of sorts.
In many ways, In Camera itself feels like a twisted fairytale; a post-colonial allegory for what happens when identity is forced through the machinery of palatability. “It’s a fairytale about an actor navigating this kind of imagined version of the industry,” Khalid says. “He is going on this journey from innocence to experience. And it is a cautionary tale.”
That cautionary tale follows Aden (played by Nabhaan Rizwan), a young actor who never seems to land a role with more than one line. He shares a flat with Bo (Rory Fleck Byrne), an overworked doctor unraveling under hospital lights, and is being mentored by the seemingly self-possessed Conrad (Amir El-Masry), the film’s equivalent to a fairy godfather, if we were to go by the fairytale analogy. But at what cost?
“We viewed him a bit like an alien,” Khalid says of developing Aden as a character. “Someone who’s responding and reacting to the world around him, and being shaped by it. If I was to navigate the world and just accept everything people say to me, what would that do? That would make me crazy. That’s what the film is.”
Khalid and Rizwan worked closely to construct the character together. There were no marks, no conventional backstory. “It was never tied in a dramaturgical sense to a character and his past,” he says. “Everything was tied to the present moment.”
Rizwan delivers a performance that is nothing short of transformative; anxious, watchful, entirely embodied. It’s the kind of performance that builds from stillness. The camera, often inches from his face, isn’t passive either. “I wanted to build a relationship where the camera is like a friend to Aiden,” Khalid explains. “We accept everything he does. We don’t judge him. There’s this constant empathy.”
Empathy, in this case, does not mean comfort. Khalid is adamant that he never wanted to make the film “easy.” “I wanted people to sit in the discomfort,” he says. “Because the things we’re exploring are not easy. These are feelings of discomfort that people who navigate these systems experience. I didn’t want to offer easy answers, because I don’t have them.”
The systems he speaks of loom over the film like a spectral presence. Inherited tools. Industrial structures. Neoliberal identity politics. “When you’re entering a space that is not built for you, you have two choices,” he says. “You either inherit, or you invent. And I didn’t want to inherit anything that was not useful to me.”
That logic extended to every aspect of the filmmaking process. “I really care about how I run a set,” Khalid says. “The act of invention of putting together a working day, and how you’re making people feel. To me, that’s more important than the film. I wanted to reimagine the film set as a site too.”
The result is a film that pulsates with interiority. A film where language, perception, and identity are always in flux. And crucially, one that doesn’t attempt to explain itself. “People are inherently unknowable,” Khalid says. “I knew none of the characters had a conventional backstory. I wanted to explore the present moment.”
Khalid rejects the idea that representation alone can be redemptive. “Neoliberal representation politics is probably one of the worst things to happen in the 21st century,” he says. “Black and brown faces in high places, that’s not going to liberate anybody.”
He knows how easy it would be to play the game. “If you perform the correct acceptability, you will be financially and career-wise rewarded,” he admits. “But I have zero interest in being a careerist. I don’t consider myself part of the film industry. I want to make work. I want to exist in a community.”
Khalid is already onto the next chapter. His next project, the short film Flint, reunites him with Rizwan and Fleck Byrne once again. “It’s a fairy tale again. But it’s a reverse fairy tale, someone going from experience to innocence,” he says. He dreamt it while shooting In Camera, and then wrote it down. “It’s very new and special to me,” he says of the film, which is set to debut later this year.
IN CAMERA is now available on VOD.