New York Story, Karachi Style

A brief write up about the director, Mehreen Jabbar, of the serial I wrote, Neeyat.

Some excerpts:

Pakistani director Mehreen Jabbar looks every inch the hip New Yorker as she munches on a hummus sandwich in a Manhattan café. She is cool and chic and talks animatedly—in rich, accented English.The Karachi-born television and film director has lived in New York for the past eight years, and it provides the backdrop for her latest project, a 20-part series for Pakistani television called “Neeyat,” which means “intention” in Urdu.

And a mention!

In the series, a visa-less New York-based Pakistani banker and his fiancée (played by one of Pakistan’s most popular male actors, Humayun Saeed, and former MTV Pakistan veejay Mahira Khan) offer to pay a Pakistani-American acquaintance for her hand in marriage in an effort to gain a green card.

The woman (played by Los Angeles-based actress Deepti Gupta, whose husband Larry Pontius wrote the story) initially declines. “I’m not for sale,” she protests. But the money is too good to pass up, and she relents. And that’s when things begin to fall apart

Woot! It airs tomorrow night, the 24th!