Directed by Vivek Bald and Alaudin Ullah
Documentary | 85 Minutes | USA | English/Bengali| Boston Premiere
Q&A with Directors Vivek Bald and Alaudin Ullah after the screening.
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 in post-9/11 America, Alaudin wants to tell his parents’ stories, but has no idea of the lives they led 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 discovers that Habib was part of a rich lost 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.
Advisory: Brief references to childhood trauma/abuse, child marriage.
Director’s Bio – Vivek Bald
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 U.S. and Britain. Bald consulted upon and appeared in the Peabody Award winning PBS documentary series, “Asian Americans.” Bald is a member of the leadership team of MIT’s Open Documentary Lab, a unit devoted to the critical analysis and production of new forms of documentary media. 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.
Director’s Bio – Alaudin Ullah
ALAUDIN ULLAH is a playwright and actor and 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. In the years that followed, Ullah has performed Dishwasher Dreams in theaters across the United States, including most recently, a 2021-22 run at Chicago’s Writers Theater in conjunction with Hartford Stage. 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 in 2022.
Co-presented by: Subcontinental Drift Boston
