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Why Gen-Z still connects with 'Rockstar' and 'Tamasha': Imtiaz Ali explains
'We should never think of them as "the other,"' insists the filmmaker, who believes younger audiences are seeking emotionality and connection more intensely than ever before
- PUBLISHED: Thu 11 Jun 2026, 11:22 AM UPDATED: Thu 11 Jun 2026, 11:30 AM
More than a decade after its release, Rockstar still finds new devotees who weren’t even teenagers when Jordan first picked up a guitar. The same is true of Tamasha, a film that underperformed on opening but now lives on in viral Instagram edits and teary rewatches on streaming platforms. For Gen‑Z, these films have become emotional shorthand for everything from burnout to doomed obsession.
Indian filmmaker Imtiaz Ali has felt this slow-burn affection building over the years. He has seen young fans defend Rockstar and Tamasha with the kind of ferocity he once reserved for the films he grew up watching, insisting that these stories “belong” to them in a way even the director cannot fully control. So when younger audiences, many of them discovering his work for the first time on their phones, tell him they see themselves in Jordan’s restlessness or Ved’s breakdown, he listens closely.
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Yet Ali is wary of turning that connection into a marketing brief. “The thing is that when we make movies, we should never make the mistake of first having a marketing strategy, first thinking about Gen‑Z, analysing them and then deciding what kind of movie to make,” he tells Khaleej Times. Movie-making, for him, is an artistic and creative job, not a demographic exercise. He is also clear about one limitation: he is no longer 25 and does not pretend to live inside every trend and meme that animates today’s feeds.
Instead, he reaches for something more personal. “The best way of finding out what a person of 25 is thinking today is to remember what I felt when I was 25,” he says. He remembers that time vividly. Rather than treating Gen‑Z as a puzzle to decode from the outside, he time-travels inwards, back to his own fears, longings and contradictions at that age, and trusts that those emotional references are still recognisable.
That is also why he resists the language of “us” and “them”. “We should never think of Gen‑Z as ‘the other,’” he insists. In his view, they carry the same basic motivations as any generation before them: the need to be seen, to be understood, to love and be loved back. If anything, he believes they may be longing for those connections even more intensely. “Yes, they are looking for love, perhaps, more than we were. They are seeking emotionality more intensely than we were,” he says.
This, he feels, is where films like Rockstar and Tamasha slip into their lives. Both stories are built on characters who feel too much, often to their own detriment. Jordan’s destructive hunger for an all-consuming love and Ved’s suffocation under a life that does not feel like his own. For a generation that often jokes about being numb, detached or “dead inside” as the world lurches from crisis to crisis, Ali’s films offer the opposite: the permission to feel deeply, messily, without irony.
“Today everybody is thinking: Can I get something that I can hold on to for a long time? Can I get something which is everlasting?” he says. In a world where connections can feel disposable and attention spans are constantly split, the idea of something enduring — a love, a friendship, a sense of self — starts to look almost radical. “Can I at least feel something and cry my heart out?” he adds. “There is so much noise, so much happening all the time, that it becomes difficult to feel almost anything.”
That is the ache he believes younger audiences bring with them when they hit play on Rockstar for the tenth time, return to Tamasha after another draining week at work or university, or rediscover films like Laila Majnu, which found renewed success upon its re-release. The films might be set in specific cultural contexts, but the emotional questions feel current. What happens when you want more than the script life has handed you? What do you do with a love that refuses to stay within bounds?
His new film, Main Vaapas Aaunga, picks up that thread from a different angle. Here, it is a present-day grandson watching his grandfather revisit a teenage romance from pre‑Partition India, wondering whether that kind of old-world love is still possible. “This film is about that,” Ali says. “It is about young people in the present world wondering: Was this kind of love only possible in the olden days?” In other words, the yearning of Gen‑Z isn’t just “for effect”, it is also for a kind of sincerity they fear might have been left behind.
Ali may not write with Gen‑Z in mind as a target group, but he recognises their questions in his own way. The reason his stories keep resonating with younger viewers, he suggests, is not nostalgia alone but a shared hunger: to be overwhelmed, to feel enough that it hurts a little, and to find, in the middle of all that chaos, something that might just last.
