Meaningful Reflections at Milwaukee Muslim Film Festival

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Motion pictures remain our most vivid and memorable form of storytelling. In 2015 the Milwaukee Muslim Women’s Coalition launched the Milwaukee Muslim Film Festival to encourage meaningful reflection on Islamic culture and the positive role of Muslims around the world. 

This year’s festival will be held at the Oriental Theatre, Oct 19-22. Each screening will feature local ethnic food offerings and a post-screening conversation with community leaders. The festival opens 7 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 19 with a free screening of the PBS documentary “Wisconsin Life: The Wisconsin Muslim Film Project,” featuring stories of Muslims throughout the state. Opening night also includes a performance of Near Eastern music by Salaam Band. 

Other highlights include: 

In Search of Bengali Harlem

7 p.m. Friday, Oct. 20

Like many immigrant kids in the U.S., comedian and playwright Alaudin Ullah rebelled against his parents’ culture. For him, the country now called Bangladesh was as cold and alien as Pluto. Embarrassed by his father’s accent and his mother’s sari, he embraced the hip-hop norms of ‘70s New York where he grew up. But following his father Habib’s death, Ullah, an actor with a busy roster of stereotypical roles he found demeaning, set out on a journey to the past.

Ullah codirected the documentary, In Search of Bengali Harlem, with filmmaker and scholar Vivek Bald. The project of several years began with Ullah’’s belated questioning of his mother Mohima and his father’s surviving friends, elderly with crumbling memories. He was aware of Habib’s first marriage to a Puerto Rican woman who had died decades earlier, but never tried to piece together the story as he grew up. Turns out that in the 1960s, Habib, age 60, returned to his village (in what then was East Pakistan) to bring back a new wife. The woman who became Ullah’s mother was 20.

Bald became the film’s Henry Louis Gates, leading Ullah through municipal and shipping records to uncover a story larger than his father’s life. By the early 1920s when Habib arrived in America, xenophobic laws banned Asian immigrants from the U.S. (and restricted many others). How did Habib get from East Bengal to East Harlem? Turns out a small community of Muslim men from South Asia, stokers and stewards on British shipping lines, jumped ship in the port of New York, married Puerto Rican and Black women, worked in service industries and kept their heads down. If they were entrepreneurs like Habib, they opened small businesses. Ullah’s dad became a restauranteur, an early introducer of East Indian cooking to New York.

Rabiye Kurnaz vs. George W. Bush

7 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 21

In a dynamic recreation of actual events, comedian Meltem Kaptan stars as Rabiye Kurnaz, the German Turkish mother of a young man held at Guantanamo. With the much-needed help of German attorney Bernhard Docke (Alexander Scheer) and American human rights activists, she took the case for her son to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Directed by German filmmaker Andreas Dresen, Kurnaz vs. Bush’s dynamo is Kaptan’s comedic turn in a serious role. Her concerned mom is an irrepressible woman with no emotional breaks, clueless beyond her immediate concerns and out of her depth in the halls of justice and the darker corridors of foreign affairs. She talks through the “silent march” for justice on the Washington Mall, and shrugs when Docke tells her that they stand on the spot where Martin Luther King Jr. spoke of his dream.

Humor and horror converge in a D.C. hotel lounge where Kurnaz shares a drink with Docke. “Allah isn’t looking,” she says with an impish smile. And then, the bar’s TV broadcasts the infamous photo of the hooded Abu Ghraib torture victim with his grinning American tormentor, giving thumbs up to the camera. 

Murat, like several Guantanamo detainees, was probably sold to the U.S. for a bounty and endured torture in Afghanistan by electric shock and waterboarding. At Guantanamo, he was caged, deprived of sleep and barraged with loud music (bad heavy metal?). Mom blames the mullah at her son’s mosque who may have encouraged him to go to Pakistan. Did Murat succumb to the temptation of Taliban ideology? If so, he seems to have never raised a weapon on their behalf. For Docke, the first question is how the U.S. could hold him without charge in a legal limbo. Justice was being denied, and in the end, Murat’s mom finds the words as well as the resolve to become an eloquent spokesperson for the rule of law.

For more information, visit mkefilm.org/mmff.