2023 LAAPFF Official Selection- "In Search of Bengali Harlem" Vivek Bald and Alaudin Ullah

About the film IN SEARCH OF BENGALI HARLEM

As a teenager in 1980s Harlem, Alaudin Ullah was swept up in the revolutionary energy of early hip-hop. He rejected his working-class Bangladeshi parents and turned his back on everything South Asian and Muslim. Now, as an actor and playwright contending with the Islamophobia of post-9/11 Hollywood, Alaudin wants to tell his parents' stories. But he has no idea who they really were, no idea of the lives they led or the struggles they faced as Muslim immigrants of an earlier era. In Search of Bengali Harlem follows Ullah from the streets of New York City to the villages of Bangladesh to uncover the pasts of his father, Habib, and mother, Mohima. Alaudin first discovers that Habib was part of an extraordinary history of mid-20th century Harlem, in which Bengali Muslim men, dodging racist Asian Exclusion laws, married into New York's African American and Puerto Rican communities - and in which the likes of Malcolm X and Miles Davis shared space and broke bread with immigrants from the subcontinent. Then, after crossing the globe to visit the former homes of his parents, Alaudin unearths unsettling truths about his mother: about the hardships and trauma that she overcame to become one of the first women to migrate to the U.S. from rural Bangladesh. In Search of Bengali Harlem is a transformative journey, not just for Alaudin Ullah, but for our understanding of the complex histories of South Asian and Muslim Americans.


Director’s Statement
In Search of Bengali Harlem takes viewers along on this years-long journey – one that not only leads to a new understanding of Alaudin’s parents, but transforms our
understanding of South Asian migration to the United States. At a time when South Asian actors, politicians, and media figures have emerged on the American popular landscape, the film both challenges the assumption that South Asians are “new” and “recent” immigrants to the U.S. and complicates the image of South Asians as doctors, engineers, and tech CEOs welcomed, as model minorities, into the fold of a multicultural United States. Just as importantly, it tells an alternate story about the often vexed relationship between South Asians and other communities of color – a story of affinity, solidarity, and collective life-making in the past that offers a sense of what might be possible in the future. Perhaps most importantly, amid continually rising anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, and anti-Asian violence, In Search of Bengali Harlem celebrates the complex lives and deep historical roots of Bangladeshi Americans, one of the least known but fastest growing groups of Muslim migrants in the United States.