Pakistan’s Street Kid MMA Fighters
FIGHT STREETS There are 366 million unregistered children in the world, and 60 million of them live in Pakistan. Filmed in the slums of Lahore, Kids Fight is a coming-of-age story stretched across eight years, following a group of young boys from childhood into their teenage lives and, in some cases, on into young adulthood. Navigating an environment of poverty, drugs, and crime with chaos, mischief, and heart, they roam the streets late at night, sell stickers to make money, and disappear from home for days on end. The conditions are difficult to escape, but a local gym established by Bashir Ahmad, a Pakistani-American veteran of the Iraq war, offers them a sense of safety and self through MMA.
Written and directed by Sarah Tareen, produced by S. Izmerai Siyar Durrani and executive produced by VICE founder Suroosh Alvi, Kids Fight goes beneath the surface of Pakistan’s teenage MMA circuit, and explores combat sports as a sanctuary from real-world violence.
| VICE: What was the genesis point for Kids Fight? Sarah Tareen: For me, Kids Fight started years ago, with a question I couldn’t shake: How do people survive what they’re forced to live through? I’d been documenting the fallout of post-9/11 Pakistan from an uncomfortably close range, from talking to students minutes after university blasts to examining hellfire missile debris while filming drone-strike aftermaths. Those experiences stay with you. They make you pay attention to the quieter, everyday survival people perform without ever naming it. |
| I had started training in MMA at Bashir Ahmad’s gym partly to manage my own anxiety and became a member of the MMA community. Bashir told me about his other gym, Shaheen, in Charrar Pind, and around the same time I came across a TIME magazine article about it. I went there expecting a simple sparring session. What I found was a neighborhood, a miniature universe—raw, chaotic, determined, pulsing with life, but also a stark mirror of systemic failure. Outside the gym, kids tore through the streets with the kind of fearless energy that comes from growing up uncounted and unseen by any system. In the ring, disciplined young fighters honed their skills. Vibrancy and neglect, survival and aspiration, coexisted in the same frame. And suddenly, the larger psychological landscape made sense: in chaos, people find pockets of safety, release, and catharsis wherever they can. That’s what sparked Kids Fight. Not a statistic, not an issue. A generation carving out identity and agency against the odds. That’s the story I had to tell. |
