Through the course of her 25-year-long musical career, Hadiqa Kiani gave plenty of interviews in which she declared that she had no interest in taking on an acting gig.
But in the summer of 2020, Hadiqa stepped in front of a TV camera to become Sakina, a repressed and battered village woman with bruises all over her body and a deep gash across her lip. Her hair wound down in a braid, she covered her head and spoke in a thick Punjabi accent.
Having endured a life of misery with an abusive husband, before finally running away one night to her old lover’s home, there was a profound sadness to Sakina. She would sometimes cry and, at other times, harden herself to face the travails that had long been a part of her destiny.