It will take a good cleaner to remove the fake blood stains ingrained in Aden’s (Nabhaan Rizwan) t-shirt after a few hours lying on the hard floor of a sterile TV set playing a nameless cadaver. This is no glamorous job, he knows, but at least it is a job, and Aden is not having much luck with those by the time we meet him at the beginning of Naqqash Khalid’s feature debut, In Camera.
Aden justifies his love of acting by pointing out how organised it is. An actor is told where to stand, what to do, what to feel and what to say. An actor knows what will come next, even when oblivious to what came before. If acting is orderliness, auditioning is chaos, a process rooted only in the certainty of uncertainty. But a budding actor needs to audition, and so Aden does, putting on a white shirt and a brave face to come in and out of reception rooms filled with fellow hopefuls.
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These waiting rooms serve as a fitting metaphor for the racial politics of entertainment, with Khalid following Aden into small spaces filled with dozens of men who share similar brown skin, dark hair and dark eyes. It is a claustrophobic predicament, made even more so by how cinematographer Tasha Back frames the bodies in the room as if they’re merging, quick glimpses at limbs, collarbones and eyes that make up for a blurry, homogenous mishmash. The actors, all wearing the same white T and blue jeans, have no name. They are numbers, referred to by (often white) assistants and casting directors as the numbers on their tags.
When Aden is finally given a name in a job, it isn’t in the way he expected. The role he plays is that of a woman’s dead son in an experimental kind of therapy session that hires actors to act out people’s loved ones in the hopes of helping process the grief. This job, at once odd and compassionate, has Aden confronting the idea of acting without the crutches of a controlled environment. Grief is chaos, and the whirlwind of feelings it entices proves a tricky maze to navigate for a young man whose demeanour is cemented in stoicism, a feeling exacerbated by the arrival of new flatmate Conrad (Amir El-Masry).
Conrad finds immediate kinship in Aden, peppering their conversations with nods to the proverbial “us” that unites the two British-Asian men. “The industry is responding to our needs. We’re the new currency and we’ve got to use it,” the fashion designer tells the deflated actor, never doubtful of a prosperous future ahead. But to Aden, Conrad’s easy-going confidence and boisterousness seems nothing but foreign, both men physically alike but dissimilar in all else.
