A festival launching Oct. 11 at Manhattan’s SVA Theatre is positioning itself as an answer to the flattened, stereotyped picture of Muslims Western media often traffics in. The New York Muslim Film Festival (NYMFF), billed as the city’s first for Muslim filmmakers, wants them telling their own stories.
The one-day event will screen 12 shorts from seven countries, with documentaries, dramas, comedies, animation and experimental pieces in the mix. Women make up a majority of the program’s directors.
“This festival exists because those stories deserve a stage in this city, not on the margins of someone else’s,” said Nawal Mubin, the festival’s co-founder and director.
The day will open with a reception for filmmakers and industry guests. Two blocks of six films each, running roughly an hour apiece, will precede the awards and the jury announcement.
Rounding out the panel are Lebanese-American filmmaker Sarah Mokh, a Sundance Feature Film Fellow who recently wrapped her first feature, “The Alchemy of Being Okay,” which Khan is producing, and Egyptian-American actor Abubakr Ali. Ali has roles coming up in Bassam Tariq’s “Your Mother Your Mother Your Mother,” opposite Mahershala Ali, and Sean Durkin’s A24 film “Deep Cuts,” and recently appeared in Kathryn Bigelow’s “A House of Dynamite.”
Streamer Watermelon+ is behind the festival’s Watermelon+ Discovery Award. Its winner, whether filmmaker or rights holder, will give the platform an exclusive license to show the film for a limited period. The Islamic Scholarship Fund, New York production and post house Lost in Space, and Aneesa Talks, which filmmaker Aneesa Khan founded to support South Asian and Muslim creatives, have also signed on as partners.
The program ranges widely in tone and subject. Justin Mashouf’s documentary “$17.74” follows a former gang member, behind bars since the 1980s, whose gesture of support for Gaza from inside prison set off a viral wave of solidarity. In Karim Emara’s Qatar-U.S. dramedy “Baba Is Melting,” a son phones his father, who is waiting in the car before Friday prayer in Doha, to challenge him over a hidden second marriage.
In Alex Aljouni’s “Bukra,” a young Syrian refugee whose sweepstakes prize is a soccer ball rushes to collect it in time for one last match with her best friend before he is gone for good. One daring move reopens old rifts among three generations of Afghan women in Negine Jasmine Sekandari and Ayda Rojhantalab’s comedy “Haram Salami,” as they weigh who they are against what custom demands and what they want.
Maram Taibah’s Saudi fantasy “Malika” explores a girl’s bond with her grandmother, and the pull between wildness and the obedience expected of girls, through a magical-realist world spun from a child’s imagination. In Bilal Shams Khan’s Pakistani drama “Sabr O Shukar,” 10-year-old Akram learns about patience and gratitude while chasing his dream of a bicycle.
