Hala

Hala (2019) is an American coming-of-age drama you can watch online on iFILM, written and directed by Minhal Baig. Seventeen-year-old Hala is Pakistani-American, raised in a suburban household where her parents' traditional Muslim values set the frame for everything. She skates, hides poems in a notebook, and has feelings for a classmate she hasn't mentioned at home.

Living in two different registers at once — who she is outside, who she has to be indoors — is already a daily negotiation. Then she learns something about her mother that destabilizes everything she thought was settled. Geraldine Viswanathan plays Hala with precise restraint: small gestures, large interior life. Baig's script doesn't resolve tidily, and that refusal is the point. Stream Hala online on iFILM.