Realizing that she may be pregnant, twenty-year-old Mariyam prepares to perform at a heavy metal club. Both Mariyam’s and her mother Sakina's lack of opening up threatens their otherwise congenial relationship. While Sakina is only able to reach out to her daughter through non-personal topics like a broken doorbell, Mariyam’s subtle cues about her internal struggles likewise fail to make any significant connection with Sakina. Isolated, sleepless, and hanging on to the last threads of reality Mariyam is confronted with an unlikely source of solace.

Director Statement

Honeycomb was born out of a desire to tell a personal story.

A personal story that highlights the nuances and challenges that young people face while living in a subculture that exists on the periphery of a larger society.

Specifically in this case, the subculture of a conservative bubble that’s within a larger liberal bubble of a country like the Netherlands, and how this forges the mind of someone who has their feet in both worlds.

There aren’t nearly enough stories told from an inside out perspective that traverse the delicate nature of the warped intergenerational communication within conservative families with migration backgrounds.

This compelled me to look inwards into my own upbringing, having been born to and brought up with a conservative Muslim Indian father and a liberal German mother.

While this sense of bifurcated identity was not as consequential for my own childhood, it did leave a deep impact on my older sister who had to navigate through relentless societal expectations.

Taking inspiration from the underlying unfairness of her situation, and wanting to create a sense of empathy and solidarity among others, who might be feeling isolated and feeling something similar, I created a story of a young woman trying to keep the two disparate halves of her identity intact.

Through this film, the goal was to counter the expectations of the characters and the audience alike and open an intimate window into the life of a young woman.

Director Biography - Haider Hussain

Born and brought up in India, Haider comes from a mixed background with a German mother and an Indian Kashmiri father. His father’s Islamic background and his mother’s German pragmatism wasn’t always a coherent blend, and that “mixed” or dual identity is what inspired Honeycomb. Haider also drew inspiration from his sister, who unfortunately had to live by a slightly stricter set of rules than him.

Haider is an autodidact filmmaker with a background in aerospace engineering. He has devoted much of the past decade to filmmaking. His love for music and science fiction is reflected in the various music videos, short films and documentaries he has made. His fascination for filmmaking follows from the fact that it is an intersection of thoughts, ideals, emotions, truths, untruths, you name it.