Currently in cinemas in the US, Mira Nair’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist opens in the UK on May 10th. Already garnering rave reviews the cast includes Riz Ahmed, Kate Hudson, Kiefer Sutherland, Liev Schreiber, Om Puri, and Shabana Azmi in outstanding performances. As always our partners at IndyBrown.TV, Omkari and Ashanti Omkar bring us fabulous interviews and this time the wonderful Ashanti sits down with the director to discuss the film.
Watch Mira Nair In The Zone!
Based on Mohsin Hamid’s best-selling and critically acclaimed novel, the story begins in 2011 in Lahore. At an outdoor café a Pakistani man named Changez (Riz Ahmed) tells Bobby (Liev Schreiber), an American journalist, about his experiences in the United States. Roll back ten years, and we find a younger Changez fresh from Princeton, seeking fortune and glory on Wall Street. The American Dream seems well within his grasp, complete with a smart and gorgeous artist girlfriend, Erica (Kate Hudson). But when the Twin Towers are attacked, a cultural divide slowly begins to crack open between Changez and Erica. Changez’s dream soon begins to slip into nightmare: profiled, wrongfully arrested, strip-searched and interrogated, he is transformed from a well-educated, upwardly mobile businessman to a scapegoat and perceived enemy. With time, he begins to hear the call of his own homeland. Taking us through the culturally rich and beguiling worlds of New York, Lahore and Istanbul, The Reluctant Fundamentalist is a story about conflicting ideologies where perception and suspicion have the power to determine life or death.
