Thursday, April 27, 2023 | 6:30pm to 9:30pm (Screening Begins 7pm)
BMCC Tribeca Performing Arts Center 199 Chambers Street, Manhattan
Join us for a screening of the feature documentary, In Search of Bengali Harlem, directed by Vivek Bald and Alaudin Ullah. After the screening there will be a panel discussion with the co-directors and Bangladeshi artists, organizers, and community members including Nahar Alam, Nadia Q. Ahmad, NYC Councilmember Shahana Hanif, DRUM (Desis Rising Up and Moving), and S. Nadia Hussain (moderator).
About the Film
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.
This event is co-organized by HCAP (Hunter College AANAPISI Project), and co-sponsored by BMCC-Hunter ABI (AANAPISI Bridge Initiative), BMCC Asian Heritage Month, BMCC Department of Ethnic and Race Studies, BMCC MultiCultural Center, and QCAP (Queens College AANAPISI Project)
Vivek Bald is an award-winning filmmaker, writer, digital media producer, and scholar. His work over the past twenty-five years has explored the stories and experiences of South Asians in the US and Britain. Bald’s first documentary, Taxi-vala/Auto-biography (1994) examined the lives, struggles, and activism of New York City taxi drivers from Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh. Bald’s second film, Mutiny: Asians Storm British Music (2003) focused on South Asian youth, music, and anti-racist politics in 1970s-90s Britain. He is the author of Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America (Harvard University Press, 2013) and is the faculty director of MIT’s Open Documentary Lab. He is also developing “The Lost Histories Project,” an interactive documentary and participatory oral history that will build upon and extend the Bengali Harlem film and book. Bald received his PhD in American Studies from NYU in 2009.
Alaudin Ullah is a comedian, actor, and playwright. He is the son of one of the first Bengali Muslim men to settle in Harlem. Ullah is the author of the acclaimed one-man show, Dishwasher Dreams, based on his father’s life in New York City in the 1930s-60s. Ullah premiered Dishwasher Dreams at the New Works Now! Festival at New York’s Joseph Papp Public Theater, and was subsequently awarded one of the Public Theater’s prestigious Emerging Writers Group Fellowships. Ullah’s three-act play Halal Brothers centers on the interactions between African American and Bengali Muslims in a Harlem halal butcher’s shop on the day of Malcolm X’s murder in 1965. This emotionally charged ensemble drama is in development for stage production. His film credits include co-starring in American Desi and several voices for the award-winning animated feature Sita Sings the Blues. He is co-director of In Search of Bengali Harlem, which has won several awards in film festivals across America including the DocNYC Special Mention Jury award. Ullah’s ongoing dedication is to creating stories and characters that counter, challenge, and correct the misperception of South Asians and Muslims.
Smita Nadia Hussain is a lifelong activist and advocate, who aims to connect grassroots work to systemic change and reform while increasing the political involvement and power of women and historically marginalized communities. Hussain is the co-founder and current board member of the Bangladeshi American Women's Development Initiative (BAWDi), a community initiative serving Bangladeshi women and girls in New Jersey, the first of its kind in her state. She serves on the Board of Education in her town of Bloomingdale, being the first Bangladeshi woman to serve on a board of education in New Jersey history.
For her day job, Hussain is a Senior Campaign Director at MomsRising, a national advocacy and movement-building organization working on issues that impact moms and families. She serves on the National Board of Directors of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the ACLU New Jersey board. She also serves on the board of the New Jersey Cultural Trust under the NJ Department of State and was recently appointed by New Jersey Governor Murphy to serve as a Commissioner on the state's Asian American Pacific Islander Commission.
Nadia Q. Ahmad is a poet, writer, editor, and workshop instructor. Her work appears in publications such as QUEENSBOUND, The Shoreline Review, Poets & Writers Magazine, and AAWW’s The Margins. Born and raised in New York City, Nadia is of Bangladeshi descent. Passionate about working at the intersection of culture and community, she has more than 15 years of experience with local grassroots arts organizations and initiatives, including the Bangladesh Institute of Performing Arts (BIPA) and the Asian American Writers' Workshop (AAWW). She has also received a Neighborhood Leadership Award from Chhaya CDC.
Nahar Alam has been an organizer in the United States and Bangladesh for twenty-seven years. She is the founder of Andolan Organizing South Asian Workers. Alam works towards a world in which all workers are treated with respect and their rights are enforced. She has been organizing South Asian immigrant workers in New York City since 1993 through several grassroots Asian/Pacific Islander community organizations. Since 2008, Alam has been a community health worker/now Lead Community Health Representative at DREAM (Diabetes Research Education and Action for Minority) at the Center for the Study of Asian American Health at NYU Medical Center, educating Bangladeshi diabetic patients. Alam was also the co-founder of the coalition that passed the New York State Domestic Workers Bill of Rights in 2010.
Shahana Hanif is the Council Member for Brooklyn’s 39th District. She was born and raised in Kensington, Brooklyn, and is the daughter of Bangladeshi Muslim immigrants. She is a product of public schools having attended P.S. 230 and Brooklyn College, an activist, community organizer, and public servant. Most recently she served as the Director of Organizing and Community Engagement in Council Member Brad Lander’s office where she led grassroots initiatives like Participatory Budgeting. Shahana is the first Muslim woman ever elected to the New York City Council and the first woman Council Member for the 39th District. She currently serves as the chair of the Immigration Committee and as one of the two co-chairs of the Progressive Caucus.
DRUM - Desis Rising Up and Moving is a multigenerational, membership led organization of low-wage South Asian and Indo-Caribbean immigrants, workers and youth in New York City.
Founded in 2000, DRUM has mobilized and built the leadership of thousands of low-income, South Asian and Indo-Caribbean immigrants to lead social and policy change that impacts their own lives- from immigrant rights to education reform, civil rights, and worker’s justice. Our membership of over 5,000 adults, youth, and families is multigenerational and represents the diaspora of the South Asian communities – Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Guyana, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Suriname, Trinidad & Tobago, and beyond. In over a decade, we have built a unique model of South Asian and Indo-Caribbean undocumented workers, women, and youth led organizing for rights and justice from the local to the global.
