Nausheen Dadabhoy on an Act of Worship
Courtesy of Nausheen Dadabhoy
Nausheen Dadabhoy's An Act of Worship is a film that changes the purpose of a camera. Government entities have used cameras in Muslim communities as a surveillance tool to spy on them without their consent. It creates a tense effect that forces community members to not express themselves entirely under a system built upon the White gaze. In this film, the filmmaking team asserts perspective and knowledge in telling a previously described, largely misinformed story by mainstream news broadcasters and filmmakers who don't have firsthand access to those places.
A highly emotional scene comes at the beginning of the final act when the audience sees the visual separation of families affected by Trump's travel ban. Dadabhoy and editor Ben Garchar precisely leave space surrounding the participant to resemble recognition and awareness. The shot transitions between the featured loved ones and relatives show that they are always together spiritually, but the law forces them to be physically distant. It implies that legislation can never defeat love.
Funded by institutions such as JustFilms Ford Foundation, Sundance Institute, Firelight Media, and Chicken and Egg Pictures, An Act of Worship made its world premiere at 2022 Tribeca. Dadabhoy recently spoke with me via zoom before its screenings about emphasizing the community, de-weaponizing the camera, and the theme of hope.
[Note: This conversation is condensed and edited for clarity.] -
EF: I got a chance to see both the short version An Act of Worship years ago and this one [the feature] too. To start off with the short, what led you to Ameena?
ND: So my sister actually worked for her. At the time, my sister Fatima was working [as] an attorney at the Council on American Islamic Relations [CAIR]. Ameena was the deputy director. But when we made the short, we had initially reached out to CAIR LA and we were filming with Hussam Ayloush, who was the executive director. When we went to the airport, the airport shoot was totally unplanned. We knew there was a ban that was going to be announced and we were getting ready for what was CAIR gonna do to address it. But like most of the protests at the airport, people thought maybe like a few people would show up and like they exploded, and we're like, so much bigger than anybody anticipated. So I was initially just going as a protester, but I was like, let me take my camera. Then CAIR told me they were going to be there. So I was like, “Great, we'll follow Hussam.” Then I saw Ameena and I think the camera just gravitated towards her. We knew each other and my sister was there. I was like, “Wow, she's on fire.” She had this incredible energy. Literally in that moment, at the protest, “I was like, we're gonna follow you. Is that okay?”
EF: Did you think that the short version would just be on its own before some of that material will be part of the feature length film that you presented at Tribeca?
ND: We initially started with the idea for the feature. We approached CAIR and were in development when the ban was announced. At that time, there was an opportunity with Firelight Media and Field of Vision to make a short that was a part of their “Our 100 Days” series of the communities that were most impacted by the Trump administration. That just felt like too good of an opportunity for us to pass up in terms of making a proof of concept and building our relationships with Field of Vision and Firelight. The short was a product of the feature and continued to be part of the feature, even though we made something that stood by itself. In my mind, it was never that there wouldn't be that material that wouldn't be used for the future.
EF: When did you discover Aber and Khadega?
ND: So actually, we finished the short in May of 2017. Then we went back into development. I spent that summer visiting a lot of different communities around the US. We went to Michigan, Alabama and Tennessee. I think we went to 20 different cities. Khadega is somebody that I met through an activist that I met in Michigan and it was [through] word of mouth. Everybody just kept mentioning her and she was so incredible and inspiring. She was only 18 when I met her, I was like, Okay, I really want to see where you're gonna go.” So I was very curious about her journey. With Aber, it was similar. We were doing a lot of outreach with people in New York, and she kept coming up. With Aber, it's also very clear that her personal story is so much a driving force in her activism. Her father's deportation is really defined what she's done with her life. There are so many people in our community that have this inciting incident in their lives that relates to a very personal matter that instigates their career and activism.
EF: Given the history of surveillance in Muslim Communities, how do you de-weaponize the camera?
ND: If you look at the imagery that we used, for instance, and all of the historical moments that we cover in the film. There was a version of the film where we had news archival, but we've already been so inundated with it and a lot of that imagery has been used to, as you said, criminalize our community and surveilled our community. Even gaining access was so difficult for us and was a long process of gaining trust, which I think is totally fine. A lot of that is because the camera has been weaponized against us. I literally take that [the camera] and put it in the hands of community members and saying, like, “this is how we see ourselves. This is how we would tell our story,” I think has a lot of power. It's a reminder that I needed. I needed to scrub through my home movies to remember like “No, this is the experience that I had.” There is a lot of trauma, but there's also all of this beauty and we need to recenter that.
EF: I can see that beauty in a lot of moments of music playing not necessarily the score, but you see characters actually playing guitars or singing.
ND: I think we got really lucky with some of the diegetic sound in the home videos, and it was too good not to use.
EF: It's a story about community, but you do have three central protagonists. How do you make sure that you still maintain the community aspect of the film?
ND: So for me, the film is definitely a community story. But what our three protagonists are able to do is take that big picture and guide the audience into all the historic moments that we're talking about. But this is how those moments have shaped the lives of different people across the US. Obviously, we're specifically looking at community organizers and activists. We're seeing how all of these moments have come together to shape them and they are a stand-in for a lot of the young people in our community and how their lives have been shaped by the last 30 years in the US. I would particularly look at people whose parents immigrated here. So it is a very specific lens about who we're looking at. People like me, whose parents immigrated here after the Immigration and Naturalization Act was passed in the 60s 70s and 80s and their kids growing up here.
EF: How did you come across special effects in the home videos, like the static sound present in the sound design and multiple screens?
ND: Some of that was inherent in the material. There's one particular scene, like a little clip that we use during 9/11, where I actually had gotten my camera. So that's me filming one of my friends. It was a brand new camera and I was cycling through all the different effects in the camera. There's a night vision, mosaic and sepia [settings]. That’s me cycling through the imagery,or the different settings. When people make home videos, they're always capturing these happy moments, which is understandable. But then when you're making a film, and, for instance, 911 we're really talking about how disturbing that was for our community. So trying to find the footage that would illuminate that was very challenging. We then started really looking for these moments where something strange happens, like somebody's cycling through the settings, or a lot of tracking. We were really fond of that material to use during these specific sections.
EF: To go on a little bit earlier about how this is just a snapshot of the last 30 years, how do you make sure that this is not necessarily a movie about history, but about people's growth from events that they're affected by?
ND: I feel like the participants in the film are a way for us to see that personal growth, and how these events impacted people. But I also think that our community voices that narrate the film, and even with the imagery, for instance, everything is going on a journey. So if you look at the film very closely, you'll see the [home video] footage that we start with, it's primarily children. Then, they become teenagers and then they graduate from college, and they start their own families. Then, you see images of a community. So there's a progression of the imagery in the home videos and then there's a progression of kind of how the voices are starting to contend with things about themselves and things about the rhetoric they're taking in. So you see people go from being kids and thinking about what happened to them in the 90s during the first Gulf War, thinking about how maybe they were hopeful with Obama and then became disillusioned, but also that was a period of self discovery. Then you have the end where the community really does decide to stand up for itself and not be marginalized anymore. So I think that journey is something that the our community is also going on. We've characterized the film as a coming of age story. I think it's not just a coming of age story of these women, but it's also a coming of age story of our community.
EF: I know you sometimes do narrative work. You have a scripted scene of an FBI Raid. Why did you decide to include it in this movie?
ND: I think documentary and narrative are both very powerful mediums in different ways. There's something about a narrative that puts you in somebody's experience differently and we really wanted people to understand here's a policy, but here's how it really affects one person. [We don’t want to do it] through an interview, or a retelling of it, but through seeing it through their eyes literally. To be really honest, we had hoped to have recreations for all the moments that we dive into, like the school bullying testimonial, the Muslim ban testimonial, [and[ the countering violent extremism testimonial. But COVID prevented us from being able to film all of those. Ultimately, I'm actually really happy that it didn't work out because I think the way we have been able to depict them helps the film in its specific language of, putting you in somebody else's experience. For instance, if we had the animation, we weren't going to go film with ISIS fighters. That was never going to be something that we filmed, but we were able to animate that in a different way. So I think ultimately, it became a strength of the film.
EF: Your film transitions from the present to the past, and or different characters. How do you know that you want to go from Aber to Khadega, or from present day to an older newsreel of George W. Bush, for example?
ND: We spent over a year editing and trying to figure that out exactly. For the most part, they're thematic connections that we're making. For the most part, the historical timeline is the driving force of the narrative. So different moments in the historical timeline are either driving us towards a specific person in the present day or a specific issue that they're working on or a specific feeling that they have. So for instance, I think we come out of looking at a talk about countering violent extremism and we come to Ameena and she's working on counter countering violent extremism. Through her, she starts talking about safety issues in the community and that leads us to a story of Chapel Hill. Building those connections is what, you know, there was a lot of note carding, there's a lot of figuring that out, and it's there were certainly a lot of different versions of it being shuffled around.
EF: One of my favorite lines that was said in the film was Aber’s dad saying that “we live in hope.” Do you believe that you live in hope sometimes?
ND: I really love that line, because I really appreciate that sentiment from him, especially after everything that's happened to their family and to him personally. I think if I didn't live in some sort of hope I wouldn't be a filmmaker. I think I live in hope, in terms of what our community is capable of and what our community has done. I'm very jaded when I think about the US government and policy that continues to impact our community.