When: Friday, Nov. 4 from 2-3:30pm
Where: HUB 250
SOUTH ASIAN IDENTITY IN A CHANGING WORLD
Chai and Conversation with the Directors of All That Breathes and In Search of Bengali Harlem
Free and open to the public. Chai and snacks to follow. Visitor parking info can be found here.
Featuring:
Shaunak Sen (Director, All That Breathes)
Vivek Bald and Alaudin Ullah (Directors, In Search of Bengali Harlem)
In conversation with:
Anand Yang (Professor of History and International Studies)
Alka Kurian (Associate Teaching Professor of Interdisciplinary Arts and Sciences)Identities are in flux today. How do individuals and groups make sense of their lives and beliefs in an ever-changing world increasingly in the throes of socioeconomic and religious conflict and environmental crises? Come join us in a conversation with the award-winning directors of the films “All That Breathes” and “In Search of Bengali Harlem” which highlight the choices people make to keep hopes alive.
This event is part of the 17th Tasveer South Asian Film Festival
About All That Breathes
In one of the world’s most populated cities, two brothers — Nadeem and Saud — devote their lives to the quixotic effort of protecting the black kite, a majestic bird of prey essential to the ecosystem of New Delhi that has been falling from the sky at alarming rates. Amid environmental toxicity and social unrest, the ‘kite brothers’ spend day and night caring for the creatures in their makeshift avian basement hospital. Director Shaunak Sen (Cities of Sleep) explores the connection between the kites and the Muslim brothers who help them return to the skies, offering a mesmerizing chronicle of inter-species coexistence.
About In Search of Bengali Harlem
As a teenager in 1980s Harlem, Alaudin Ullah was swept up in the revolutionary energy of early hip-hop. He rejected his working-class Bangladeshi parents and turned his back on everything South Asian and Muslim. Now, as an actor and playwright in post-9/11 America, Alaudin wants to tell his parents’ stories, but has no idea of the lives they led as Muslim immigrants of an earlier era. In Search of Bengali Harlem follows Ullah from the streets of New York City to the villages of Bangladesh to uncover the pasts of his father, Habib, and mother, Mohima. Alaudin discovers that Habib was part of a rich lost history of mid-20th century Harlem, in which Bengali Muslim men, dodging racist Asian Exclusion laws, married into New York’s African American and Puerto Rican communities – and in which the likes of Malcolm X and Miles Davis shared space and broke bread with immigrants from the subcontinent. He also unearths the hardships and trauma that his mother overcame to become one of the first women to immigrate to the U.S. from rural Bangladesh. In Search of Bengali Harlem is a transformative journey, not just for Alaudin Ullah, but for our understanding of the complex histories of South Asians and Muslims in the United States.
