New York’s Debut Muslim Film Festival Aims Beyond Counter-Narratives

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.

Hassan Babar, the festival’s artistic director, said such stories should not merely serve as counter-narratives. “They should be the establishing paradigm,” Babar said.

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.

Emmy winner Aasif Mandvi, a longtime “The Daily Show” correspondent who also starred in Paramount+ series “Evil,” sits on the six-member jury. He is joined by Arab-American writer-director Darine Hotait, founder of Cinephilia Productions, whose shorts have aired on HBO, AMC, SundanceTV and the BBC; Munir Atalla, head of production and acquisitions at Watermelon Pictures and a former Netflix creative executive; and producer Abubakar Khan, whose resume includes “The Glassworker,” Pakistan’s entry for the 2024 Oscars, and SXSW 2023 audience award winner “Mustache.”

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.

Zaid Ahmed Hassan’s “Ghusl” centers on a son whose dying father asks him to learn Islamic burial rites, while Basma Khalifa’s U.K. experimental piece “Henna” follows the henna plant’s life cycle alongside women from 16 African and SWANA countries. Sima Naseem’s Canada-Pakistan animation “My Friend in the Jingle Truck” combines stop-motion and 2D to tell of a Karachi girl who meets a magical bird.

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.

Imran J. Khan’s “The Boy With Dinosaur Head” pits a troubled boy who believes he is a dinosaur against a teacher set on pulling him back to reality, and their short encounter stays with both of them. Ilhan Abdullahi and Sherry Rashidan’s Canadian comedy “Unqualified” follows Warsan, the lone Muslim at her workplace, who is handed the job of spiritually cleansing a lunchroom said to be haunted and must clear out the spirits, armed with her faith and a string of misunderstandings, before she loses her job.

Lyna Tadount and Sofian Chouaib’s French drama “Ya Hanouni” centers on two parents vying to be their baby’s first word, until their lighthearted contest is cut short by an event that upends their lives.

Babar, a Toronto-based actor and producer, co-heads programming with Aneesa Khan, who also leads communications. Mubin, a New York director-producer, co-founded the festival with filmmaker and post-production specialist Giuseppe de Matteis. Both work at Lost in Space.