Once again our brill media partners Indybrown.tv, Omkari and Ashanti Omkar bring us a special video interview, this time with Riz Ahmed. On screen, Riz Ahmed is best known for his intense performances in films such as Four Lions, Shifty and Trishna. Off-screen, under the name Riz MC, he has been working a parallel career in hip hop. Ahmed once again took to the film stage and has been garnering rave, rave, rave reviews for his performance in Mira Nair’s The Reluctant Fundalmentalist. He is brilliant in the role of Changez, in a film that also boasts incredible actors like Liev Schreiber, Kate Hudson, Kiefer Sutherland and Om Puri. Now playing in the US, the film opens in the UK on May 10th and it is one we say you must check out!
Check out what this rising star in cinema reveals to Ashanti Omkar about his biggest film yet in this fabulous and fun interview In The Zone!
Synopsis: Student demonstrations are raging in Lahore in 2010, as young Pakistani professor Changez Khan (Ahmed) and a journalist, Bobby Lincoln (Schreiber), share a cup of tea and conversation. Princeton-educated Changez tells Lincoln of his past as a brilliant business analyst on Wall Street, working for the ruthless Underwood Sampson (Sutherland). He talks of the glittering future that lay before him and the beautiful and sophisticated Erica (Hudson) with whom he was set to share that future. But then 9/11 changes everything.
Attitudes shift dramatically – his very name and face rendering him suspect. Returning to his homeland and the family to whom he is very close, he takes up a post as lecturer at the local university, a hotbed of radicalism and the new militant academia. The collegial pretense of the meeting in a Lahore tea house, between Lincoln and Changez, slowly gives way to why the unlikely pair has gathered on a summer day – another professor has been kidnapped by extremists, and the clock is ticking toward a deadline for his execution. Changez’s family is being harassed and is in real danger. Bobby is there to listen, with an agenda of his own. Leading us through the culturally rich and beguiling worlds of New York, Lahore and Istanbul, THE RELUCTANT FUNDAMENTALIST is an exploration of bias and the phenomenon of globalization.
