May I Have This Seat?
2020 · 10m · Pakistan
Directed by Tabish Habib
Tones: provocative, tense
During smog season in Lahore, a young pregnant woman boards a crowded city bus and asks a seated man to give up his seat. His refusal escalates into a public confrontation that exposes the casual cruelty and bystander apathy of the passengers around them.
Picked by Felix
The scouts
Most scripts about moral courage telegraph the hero's righteousness from frame one—Habib does the opposite, trapping us in real time on a bus where decency is inconvenient and the pregnant woman's plea becomes a mirror held up to every passenger (and us) who'd rather look away. It's a provocation disguised as a bus ride, and it works precisely because it refuses to comfort anyone.
The formal restraint here—fixed camera, unbroken chronology, the microcosm tradition stretching back through Haneke and Koreeda—creates a pressure chamber where social indifference becomes visible not through declaration but through the geometry of who sits and who stands. Habib understands that staging IS argument.
The film's entire moral weight hinges on the man's sustained silence in his seat—not a performance of defiance, but a performance of non-performance—and that choice, that flat refusal to engage, says more about complicity than any reaction shot ever could.
Reviews
May I Have This Seat is an outstanding short film that delivers a strong message in just ten minutes!
Watch the film to see how aptly the writer has portrayed the mentality of the general public — their unhelpful nature, their immediate desire to simply seek thrills and entertainment out of the plight of any fellow citizen.
Festivals
- Aesthetica Short Film Festival 2020
- Tasveer Film Festival 2020
- Dubai Independent Film Festival 2021, Best International Short Film
- Festival Internazionale del Cinema Povero 2021, Best International Short Film
- ShorTS International Film Festival 2021