Fresh off the festival success of Moshari, filmmaker Nuhash Humayun is back with another horror short – Foreigners Only, part of the third season of Hulu’s Bite Size Halloween, zooms in on the micro injustices of neo-colonialism in the modern age. In Bangladesh, where Foreigners is set, there is a clear and deep preference for expats. Landlords … Read More
The reluctant wedding guest is a mainstay of the romcom genre. It’s a trope ripe for dramatic speechifying and dance montages. And in recent years we’ve seen it deployed successfully with films like Plus One and Palm Springs, proving that romcoms in the 2020s are still alive and still boldly asking if a woman can … Read More
Iram Bilal’s new film, I’ll Meet You There, ends with a quote by Rumi: “Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I’ll meet you there.” In a nuanced depiction of a Pakistani American, Muslim family in Chicago, Bilal offers a moving rumination of that field. The film follows Dua (Nikita Tewani), … Read More
Everyone has an opinion about Netflix’s reality dating-cum-wedding show Indian Matchmaking, which follows a handful of singles in India and America as they attempt to find their life partners through an Indian matchmaking service run by “master matchmaker” Sima Taparia. The end goal is a lavish Hindu wedding. The show has been rightly criticized for … Read More
Since the 1940s, the beginning of the Golden Age of Hindi cinema, the Sufi song form of qawwali has been a prominent feature in Bollywood film. Due to the rich sociocultural and religious history of qawwali in the subcontinent, it is easy, even for South Asians, to picture the qawwali as a solely Islamic sacred … Read More
Released on Netflix last month, Naga filmmaker Nicholas Kharkongor’s Axone (2019) is the first mainstream Hindi movie to address the racism that northeastern migrants face in the Indian capital of New Delhi. Despite its meticulous attention to varying shades of discrimination, the movie betrays itself through a dangerous attitude of “kuch nahin hota” , or … Read More
Nestled in a strip mall in Woodbridge, New Jersey, is Nazranaa – the go-to store for South Asian wedding wear. Behind the counter stands Shia Gupta, the owner and designer of the shop, and the face of the popular YouTube series Nazranaa Diaries. Mimicking the style of Say Yes to the Dress, complete with clunky … Read More
Rajiv Surendra is a Canadian actor, writer, painter, and chalk artist with Sri Lankan Tamil roots. After rising to fame for his role as Kevin G in the 2004 movie Mean Girls, he published The Elephants In My Backyard in 2016. The memoir explores successes and failures through a six year attempt at securing the … Read More
Ramy, streaming now on Hulu, follows the life of Ramy Hassan, a Muslim American man who lives in New Jersey with his family. It delves into the classic trials of being a first-generation immigrant Muslim. The show’s creator, 28 year old Ramy Youssef, is also an Egyptian-American Muslim from New Jersey. While the show isn’t … Read More
“I am not a girl, I am a storm with skin” reads one of the first shots in the title sequence of Four More Shots Please, Amazon India’s latest original “woman-centric” show. The phrase serves as a manifesto for the show, in which each character is less complex, layered individual and more vessel for a … Read More
