'' GHOST SCHOOL '' : FILM'S SPLENDID HONOURS

TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM  FESTIVAL : '' MY themes dictate my characters,'' says Seemab Gul. '' Ghost School is a character-driven film.''

Premiering at TIFF - the Urdu-language film follows 10-year-old Rabia - a striking performance by child actor Nazualiya Arslan - as she unravels the mystery behind her public school's sudden closure.

'' This school too has become a ghost school '', she hears a man say as she reaches her educational institution the morning after summer break ends.

Explored from the innocence of this child's perspective and her curiosity to understand what the term means, little Rabia embarks on a journey around her small fishing village, where conversations with her mother, schoolteacher, local landlord, barber uncle, fruit seller, school security guard and a posh society lady visiting from Karachi, all result in an introspective coming-of-age story.

In one of the film's most evocative sequences, Rabia walks alongside her school's former security guard as he recalls his own education and the fragile hope he still carries for the future.

Shot in a single, unbroken take reminiscent of Abbas Kiarostami's meditative frames, the pair drift slowly into the distance until they reach a fork in the road and wordlessly part ways.

The camera holds steady, it lingers, unthinking as their paths diverge. What seems deceptively simple becomes profoundly lyrical : a moment that captures, with disarming clarity, how fleeting, tender, and vast the conversations that this little is having are.

The little girl captures both the literal and metaphorical haunting at the heart of this film. For the protagonist, the ''ghosts'' she sets out to uncover seem, at first, to be mythical jinns, whispered about in her community.

But the real spectres are far more insidious : systemic neglect, corruption, and the men who engineer and sustain these failures.

The evil spirits are not supernatural, but are humans.

The World Students Society thanks Zehra Nawab.