What it means to be a 'Mooz-lum' - emel Magazine

Worldwide demand for Mooz-lum, the movie, has rocketed after the film gained exceptional reviews across the USA. A wholly viral campaign to promote the film has brought it to the UK this week. Ethar El-Katatney shares her thoughts in this exclusive online review on why the film deserves recognition by the mainstream box office.    

Muslim-Americans Try To 'Write' Hollywood's Wrongs - NPR

It’s Saturday morning, and several dozen Muslims are gathered in a college classroom in Los Angeles. There are men and women, young and old, U.S.-born and immigrants, but they all have a common dream: to break into show business.

In television and films, however, Muslims are often portrayed as the bad guys, like the terrorists seen in FOX’s 24 or in the Bruce Willis film The Siege. A group called the Muslim Public Affairs Council has been working with Hollywood studios for years to foster more accurate portrayals.

And recently it has adopted a new tactic: The group is teaching Muslim-Americans how to become Hollywood screenwriters.

Marium Mohiuddin, communications coordinator for the Muslim Public Affairs Council, says in the past the group had some success consulting non-Muslim writers and producers at Hollywood studios. But realistic depictions of Muslims, both positive and negative, are still rare, she says.

“The Muslim-American community is kind of at that point, ‘We’re like OK, we want these stories to be told. You’re not telling it, so we have to do it,’” she says.

Bringing In Hollywood Insiders

So they’ve enlisted insiders like Oscar-nominated Tom Cook to teach courses specifically tailored to Muslims.

“I’ve always thought of writers as outsiders, and who is more of an outsider in modern day America than Muslims?” Cook says.

Among those taking notes from the veteran writer is Pakistani-born Avais Chughtai.

“One of the things Tom Cook said [is], ‘What the Hollywood industry likes is experiences, you know, the personal experiences,’” Chughtai says. “But it’s up to us to actually go and write those experiences and share them.”

The workshops also brought in agents and executives who explained how to turn those experiences into scripts that actually get made, which as Qasim Basir can attest, is no small feat.

If all you see is bad, bad, bad, then how are you ever going to tell the American community that ‘Don’t worry, you’re fine, your Muslim neighbor is not going to do anything to you?’

- Marium Mohiuddin, communications coordinator for the Muslim Public Affairs Council

Basir wrote and directed the recent feature film MOOZ-lum, a semi-autobiographical tale of a young African-American who struggles with the challenges of being raised Muslim.

Finding financing for MOOZ-lum was a real challenge, Basir says. Hollywood executives didn’t quite know what to do with a film about African-Americans who were also Muslims.

“Because we know how to sell Big Momma’s House 4, you know? We know how to sell the Tyler Perry movies, but this here — who’s the audience for this?” Basir says.

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"Salam Rugby" Serves as a Good Start to This Year's Women's International Film & Arts Festival

The new documentary Salam Rugby goes a long way to dispute Smiley’s assertion while verifying Maher’s righteous feather-ruffling. Screening as part of the sixth-annual Women’s International Film & Arts Festival, the movie critiques the universal through the specific, using a hardscrabble team of female rugby players in Iran as a microcosm of the nation’s struggle for gender equality. It’s not a perfect documentary — it jumps around thematically to the point of being a narrative scattershot — but it’s full of revelations.

For the aspiring female athletes of Iran, access to the freedoms of their male counterparts is an uphill battle, a struggle that appears both Sisyphean and Kafkaesque in its endless absurdity. The conditions are a bit like those in the Jim Crow South: The women are mostly subjected to playing in segregated, indoor facilities, where they practice on unforgiving concrete floors, unable to even attend men’s games on the outdoor fields.

The more that director Faramarz Beheshti’s documentary expands, the more pungent and all-encompassing its polemic becomes. The women’s rugby organization profiled in the film played all of two matches in seven years, and the same struggles have colored most sports procedures since the Iranian Revolution promised better conditions in the sporting world. The film delves into the hardships of female journalists whose attempts to cover major sporting events are stymied due to laws prohibiting women at games (the logic behind this, which sounds ironically sexist toward men, is that the males are savages and won’t be able to contain their sexual urges around women; this is also why males are prohibited from coaching women’s teams). In this way, Salam Rugby becomes a companion piece to 2006’s Offside, a brilliant semidocumentary about girls who masquerade as boys to sneak into a World Cup-qualifying soccer match in Tehran. Jafar Panahi, director of Offside, was, like many activists in Iran, punished for his art; he was sentenced to a six-year prison term and a 20-year filmmaking ban late last year, to an international outcry from the global film community and Amnesty International.

Burying the lead more than halfway into Salam Rugby, Beheshti produces sobering statistics about Iranian patriarchy that make our own country’s gender inequalities look like an unattainable fantasy: Men can escape conviction for murdering their wives, daughters, or granddaughters if they suspect them of infidelity; women’s testimony in court is worth half of men’s; and women do not have custody over their children. These kinds of facts should be better-known in the West, and not just as intellectual ammunition to debate cultural relativists. If distributed to and seen by enough people, documentaries like this bring us one step closer to international awareness and possibly even change.

Hollywood Ignores East-West Exchange - NYT

AT the Oscars last month the gap between what interests Hollywood and what the rest of the world seems to be doing was sharp and clear. Of the five nominees for the best foreign-language film, all but one, among them the winner, “In a Better World,” from Denmark, dealt in some way with relationships between the West and Islam.

So did many others of the 65 films offered for consideration by film academies around the globe, including the French, German, Dutch and Bulgarian submissions. In contrast, each of the nine American films that were nominated for best picture and eventually lost to “The King’s Speech” from Britain were inward looking, with purely domestic concerns — a characterization that can be applied to movies as different in style and substance as “The Social Network,” “Black Swan,” “The Fighter” and “True Grit.”

“I don’t think that kind of thing is coincidental,” Susanne Bier, the director and a writer of “In a Better World,” which opens in New York on April 1, said when asked to explain the profusion of foreign films addressing aspects of the complex ties between the Western and Islamic worlds. “There’s always a kind of wave of themes” in social and political discourse, she said, “a current that one not so subconsciously addresses.”

The main character of “In a Better World” is a Danish doctor who shuttles between humanitarian missions in refugee camps in a country much like the Sudan, and a small town in rural Denmark. In both realms he is forced to confront a fundamental moral question: When, if ever, is violence justified?

But why isn’t the United States also part of that same emerging global cinematic conversation? Why isn’t Hollywood also making movies that grapple with the issues that are provoking filmmakers elsewhere? And when Arab and Muslim characters do appear on screen, why are they presented in such simplistic and stereotyped ways?

It’s not that Hollywood hasn’t made films set in the Islamic world. “The Hurt Locker” even won the Oscar for best picture last year, and “Syriana,” which won George Clooney an Oscar, and “Three Kings,” also featuring Mr. Clooney, along with Brian de Palma’s “Redacted,” also take place in the contemporary Middle East.

But in such films the focus is on the Americans characters, whether soldiers, C.I.A. operatives or businessmen, rather than the society itself or the interaction of Americans with local people and their customs. “We see everything through American eyes, without context or a representation of community” on the Islamic side, said Matthew Bernstein, an editor of the book “Visions of the East: Orientalism in Film” and chairman of the film and media studies department at Emory University in Atlanta.

Exceptions to this pattern are rare, confined to under-the-radar features like “Amreeka,” a 2009 portrait of a Palestinian family that moves from the West Bank to suburban Chicago, only to encounter prejudice in the aftermath of 9/11 and the Iraq war, and Tom McCarthy’s “Visitor.” In 2009 “The Visitor” earned a best actor Oscar nomination for Richard Jenkins, who played a widowed, depressed college professor who discovers a Syrian immigrant musician and his Senegalese girlfriend living in his Manhattan apartment and develops a friendship with the couple.

“Mine was a humanistic approach, as opposed to political or social, and I think that makes a big difference,” said Mr. McCarthy, who traced his interest in the Middle East and its complicated passions to a State Department-sponsored trip he made to Beirut to work with filmmakers there. “The spirit of the Lebanese people was so warm, engaging and verbal that it almost reminded me of my Irish heritage, and that was something I hadn’t seen portrayed in an American film.” But as Mr. McCarthy also noted, his was also a low-budget, character-driven indie film, which gave him the freedom to take his story where he wanted, without having to worry about high-concept pitches, marketing strategies or focus groups. For movies made within the Hollywood studio system for a mass market, the dynamic is very different.

“I’m not sure the industry sees a lot of box-office potential in getting these representations right and portraying Muslims or the Islamic religion in a more nuanced and realistic way,” Mr. Bernstein said. “It’s easier to simply represent everyone as fanatical and a threat to America, and easier still not even to go near it, because then you upset a lot fewer people.”

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Spirituality Is The Star At Sundance - Huffington Post

At the 2011 Sundance Film Festival, I saw 26 films in six days. If this festival is about storytelling, this year’s big story is about our universal spiritual quest. Here are a few snapshots.

“Higher Ground” tells the true story of Carolyn Briggs, who became disillusioned with and left the Jesus movement, only to find that she missed the comforts of real community and certain belief. Director Vera Farmiga told us that Briggs didn’t leave religion, but rather an “impoverished expression of the Christian religion.”

“Septien” is the quirky story of eccentric, troubled but loveable brothers. An evil incident in the distant past is the cause of their madness, and a Christian prophet arrives to rid them of their demons. Screenwriter Michael Tully confessed he is not religious, but thought it would be refreshing to infuse the Christian story with, well, sincerity.

In “Abraxas,” Japanese director Naoki Kato tells the story of Jonan, a teenaged punk rocker-turned-Buddhist monk. When his passion to create music returns, he has trouble reconciling it with his religion. Kato confessed that he, too, has no religion, but added, “Humans can’t live without both music and spirituality.”

In “The Redemption of General Butt Naked,” documentarians Eric Strauss and Daniele Anastasio tell the true story of Joshua Milton Blahyi, who claims to have murdered over 20,000 during Liberia’s civil war in the 1990’s. After a conversion experience and a new career as an evangelist, Blahyi seeks the forgiveness of families affected by his violent past. The filmmakers follow the evangelist over five years, drawing the audience into the complexity of the man and the messiness of his redemption.

In “Position Among the Stars,” filmmaker Leonard Retel Helmrich traces the lives of one Indonesian family in the slums of Jakarta. Grandmother Rumidjah is the Christian matriarch who lives in a small village and struggles with her sons Bakti and Dwi, who have both converted to Islam. Her self-centered granddaughter, Tari, is still Christian but is more influenced by Western pop culture. Grandma has invested heavily in Tari’s education, but when she travels to Tari’s high school graduation, the visit reveals major conflicts between traditional values and the modern world.

In “Kinyarwanda,” Alrick Brown tells the true story of the Mufti of Rwanda, who during Rwanda’s 1994 bloodbath forbade Muslims from killing, and opened his mosque as a place of refuge where Muslims, Christians, Hutus and Tutsis could come together to protect each other.

“Gun Hill Road” is a sensitive, believable exploration of the clash between a macho Latino father who returns home from prison, and his teenage son, Michael, who comes out as Vanessa, a transgender woman.

Polish filmmaker Lech Majewski’s “The Mill and the Cross” is a creative, devotional homage to faith as it translates Pieter Bruegel’s 1564 epic masterpiece, “The Procession to Calvary,” into an imaginative narrative of the characters in the painting.

“Salvation Boulevard” and Kevin Smith’s “Red State” both exploited religion for entertainment. “The Ledge” pits an atheist against a believer, but screenwriter Matthew Chapman chooses a mentally unstable caricature for his Christian protagonist. Chapman dedicated the screening to atheist Christopher Hitchens and to murdered Ugandan gay activist David Kato who, he said, was dead because of the “influence of American evangelical Christians.”

Braden King’s “Here” actually delivered the most transcendent moment at this year’s festival. The film tells the story of two wandering souls: Will, a satellite-mapping engineer conducting a survey of Armenia, and an Armenian expatriate and photographer who recently returned home.

As “Here” begins, the narrator explains that in ancient days when explorers met, each would share their map of their world with the other.

It’s a useful metaphor for Sundance. We arrive with a map of our known world, and we see and hear stories revealing maps of other worlds. Only when we realize our map is a map of OUR world, and not a definitive map of THE world, can we begin to grasp reality. And only then can we learn to love and understand each other despite our differences.

It’s a particularly important reminder in the world of religion, where lines, boundaries and territories are quickly drawn and guarded, and the sharing of variant maps is discouraged at best and forbidden at worst.

FiLUMS 2011

My cousin’s movie is playing in this film festival today!

FiLUMS is a festival, where different students from all over the country and abroad are invited to speak their minds through the most celebrated of media.

The aim of FiLUMS is to promote the art of cinema and film making in Pakistan. It serves as an important platform for the youth, upcoming film makers and enthusiasts to showcase their talent and come together to celebrate their passion. FiLUMS has grown each year with the number of amateur entries increasing every year. It has screened more than a total of 500 entries in its first four editions.

   About LUMS Media Arts

LMA – who hasn’t heard of it? The LUMS Media Arts Society, undoubtedly one of the largest and most happening societies at LUMS, inspires all those who recognize the ever growing importance of media as a powerful channel for human expression. LMA is dedicated to creating, producing and promoting all forms of media amongst students. Through varied media ventures related to photography and film making, this society fosters excellence in creative expression, aesthetic appreciation and practical incorporation of media.

The events that LMA organizes and holds are geared towards understanding the importance of media and serve as outlets for innovative and productive activities. The main events are FiLUMS, the annual All Pakistan short film festival; Olympiad, a manifold event celebrating art and media; and Film Realm, a short film, photography and photo essay competition. Not only are these events attended by the leading universities and schools of the country and many talented individuals, but they also receive immense media coverage and celebrity attention.

For more information about LMA please visit: www.lumsmediaarts.com

Keshavarz's Circumstance Wins Audience Award At Sundance

Teenagers Atafeh, and her best friend, Shireen, are experimenting with their burgeoning sexuality amidst the subculture of Tehran’s underground art scene when Atafeh’s brother, Mehran, returns home from drug rehab as the prodigal son.

Battling his demons, Mehran vehemently renounces his former life as a classical musician and joins the morality police. He disapproves of his sister’s developing intimate relationship with Shireen and becomes obsessed with saving Shireen from Atafeh’s influence. Suddenly, the two siblings, who were close confidants, are entangled in a triangle of suspense, surveillance, and betrayal as the once-liberal haven of the family home becomes a place of danger for the beautiful Atafeh.

Sufi Designer

Whispers spread through Lahore like a hush through a dense forest. Muzaffar Ali was in the city and he had broken down in tears while Hina Nasrullah was reciting Bulleh Shah’s kaafis during the launch of his book, Sufis of Punjab, at the Governor House. It wasn’t unexpected.

Ali was ostensibly here for Bridal Couture Week but Lahore draws men like him for far more deep-rooted reasons than fashion. It is, after all, the land of sufi poets. Ali had visited Abida Parveen in hospital a day earlier; he had paid his respects at the tombs of Nur Jehan and Jahangir. His 90-year-old paternal aunt had traveled from Karachi for his showing and book launch. Muzaffar Ali was visibly moved by every moment he spent in this cultural city.

“I have an emotional connection with Lahore,” he says. “This trip has been enriching.”

And having spent no more than moments with the man, it was still easy to see that emotions are what make Ali tick.

Film maker, designer, author, mystic … there are so many labels that define him, and yet it’s impossible to underline just one. He is a sufi designer and mystic filmmaker, the ethos of his work being subtlety and gentleness that infiltrates everything he does. And he has done it all and more in the past thirty years.

If there’s one word that describes the man best, it’s ‘revivalist’ because whether it is adapting Mirza Hadi Ruswa’s novel Umrao Jaan Ada to film, following sufism through Jalaluddin Rumi’s intense poetry or reinventing the simplicity of the age old craft of chikankari, one of Lucknow’s sartorial legacies, Ali continuously strives to keep history alive. He picks up traditions from the past and reasserts their relevance in a new world order. They are revived but not at the risk of losing their ancient charm.

Film

“I now want to make a film on (Empress) Nur Jehan,” he says, causing people to wonder whether he would cast a Pakistani actresses as the star. “My film would be a human saga.”

As a filmmaker, Ali will remain best known for the piece of lyrical brilliance he created with Umrao Jaan in 1981. The film left a legacy that remains unparalleled when it comes to narrating the richness of Lucknow as a home to tradition, culture, art and poetry. Though he could never achieve that success in any other film, it didn’t stop him from trying and now he wants to narrate another historical tale.

He isn’t too happy with the way films, especially period films are made in India today. “The west has a better idea of what old India was,” he reminisces. “We don’t live up to the imagination. I think it’s because people who put money into films these days don’t have the right vision. It’s a battle I’ve been fighting for years.”

Needless to say, J P Dutta’s remake of Ali’s Umrao Jaan (though Dutta insisted it wasn’t a remake) wasn’t a patch on the original. It lacked both body and soul required to transport the viewer to British India. So what did Ali think of the film?

“I didn’t watch the new Umrao Jaan so cannot comment on that,” Ali says, smiling when I ask him the completely clichéd and yet irresistible question. “I was warned not to.”

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