Milwaukee Muslim Film Festival Returns to Oriental Theatre

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This year’s Milwaukee Muslim Film Festival opens with a powerful documentary, An Act of Worship. The film by Pakistani American director Nausheen Dadabhoy catalogs the abuse many Muslim Americans have endured in classrooms and on the streets. Women in hajibs are easily targeted by white supremacists and evangelical fundamentalists, but men profiled as Middle Eastern have also endured slurs and violence. Mosques have been burned. Hate killings have occurred.

Against the drumbeat of violence committed by al-Qaeda, ISIS, the Taliban and other extremists, Muslim Americans have been falsely singled out as prone to terrorism. An Act of Worship wrestles with issues of assimilation (the need felt by some to “blend in”) and shows efforts by Muslim Americas to organize with allies around common causes of immigration and human rights.

It's not the only outstanding selection in this year’s festival. Boy from Heaven is a beautifully composed film by Sweden’s Tarik Saleh about a student at Cairo’s Islamic seminary drawn into a web of conspiracy by the Egyptian secret police. Boy from Heaven earned Best Screenplay at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. Tantura by Israeli director Alon Schwarz explores the massacre at a Palestinian village during Israel’s 1948 War of Independence, an incident that continues to draw controversy in a nation eager (like many other nations) to overlook the dark aspects of its history. Lean Hosea’s Thirst for Justice is a documentary on toxic water problems in Flint, Michigan, the Navajo reservation at Sanders, Arizona and the growing awareness of the global crisis of clean water.

Also included in the festival is Scattered People, a timely documentary about Iranian refugees from their country’s Morality Police detained in Australia; and Wandering, a Rohingya Story, which looks at conditions for the Muslim Rohingya of Myanmar, forced to flee to neighboring Bangladesh.

The Milwaukee Muslim Film Festival runs Thursday, Oct. 20 through Sunday, Oct. 23 at the Oriental Theatre.