SF Int'l South Asian Film Festival: It's My Country Too
As we settled into our seats at the Castro for the world premiere of documentary It's My Country Too, part of the SF Int'l South Asian Film Festival, there was a generalized hubbub as a tall man wearing black and carrying a guitar case strode down the aisle. We heard his escort say, "It's so weird that no one's recognizing you!"
Turns out that man is Pakistani-American rock star Salman Ahmed, the narrator of the documentary It's My Country Too. Ahmed is the lead guitarist for the band Junoon, which has been called the U2 of Pakistan. We think this makes Ahmed Bono (scroll down to read Bono's letter to Ahmed), since the Edge doesn't seem to take too many positions on global politics. Junoon actually seems to be, in spirit and in sound, more like Pakistan's Rage Against The Machine with Ahmed their Tom Morello, but we don't actually know anything about the Pakistani rock scene.
It's My Country Too, produced by the BBC, follows Ahmed as he travels America trying to see how 9/11 politics have affected the Pakistani-American community. After the jump: Muslim comedians, Muslim lawyers, and the founders of the website Muslims for Bush (who are Salman Ahmed's aunt, uncle, and cousin).
Picture of Salman Ahmed from the BBC website
The movie features plenty of Junoon music, intercut between various Pakistani-American stories all filmed right before the 2004 election: a Pakistani woman in New York whose son was killed at work in the World Trade Center and the government's refusal to confirm or deny whether they were investigating him as a terrorist because of his faith; a Muslim attorney in Michigan representing Abu Ghraib prisoners in a civil law suit; a taxicab driver who recognizes Ahmed and sings a Junoon song with him -- all tied together with the repeated sentiment, "It's our country too."
We particularly enjoyed the segment about the Muslim comedy troupe "Allah Made Me Funny" (troupe member Azhar Uzman pictured at left) -- because, well, the movie was getting a little intense by this point (and it's just this correspondent's musical tastes -- but we're not really into the prog-rock guitarwork of Junoon, so the scenes of them in concert weren't really doing it for us. We don't like U2 either, if that helps.)
But what really made the movie for us were the scenes of Ahmed's conservative branch of the family -- his incredibly rich aunt and uncle and their earnest conservative son, who have given enough money to Bush that they've been invited to the ranch. They take the position that Bush has treated Muslims very well and that the Patriot Act is the fault of bad Muslims making it harder for everyone else. Fascinating! That's not to say they haven't faced discrimination: Ahmed's cousin says, "Well, I got stopped at an airport for no reason once. So I called up the administration afterwards to complain -- and nothing's happened since!" Clearly Ahmed comes from a verrrrrry interesting family. We would have loved to have learned more about that.
We had to leave before the Q&A session, but there were certainly no shortage of Junoon fans in the audience eagerly awaiting a little anti-Bush and acoustic set. We're sorry we missed it.