Asian Heritage Month: In Search of Bengali Harlem Documentary Film Screening and Conversations with Director and Panel

Doors open at 6:30 p.m.; film starts at 7 p.m.

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

Directed by Vivek Bald and Alaudin Ullah
Produced by Susannah Ludwig
Edited by Beyza Boyacioglu

Post-screening discussion with co-Directors Vivek Bald and Alaudin Ullah and other guests TBA

RSVP for free tickets.

Students receive co-curricular transcript credit (CCT) for participation at any two or more Asian Heritage Month events.

See a complete list of Asian Heritage Month events.

If you have any questions, please contact Soniya Munshi at smunshi@aaari.info.

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