Silhouettes is a new independent film about South Asians in America that deals with issues of identity, race, empowerment, abuse, and is ultimately a story about emancipation. The film has two South Asian women in the lead roles: Pakistani-American actress Fawzia Mirza, and Indian-American Puja Mohindra. Check out the trailer below:
The film is produced by Tom Silva, and I’m excited to present an interview with him!
What is “Silhouettes” about?
Silhouettes is a love story that unfolds over a series of conversations, in the spirit of “Before Sunset” and “Lost in Translation.” Aamod is a retired executive who lives alone in his sprawling downtown Chicago apartment; Nadia is a successful lawyer in transit to see her conservative Muslim parents for the first time in more than a decade. Both are nursing their own traumas of loss and banishment. After a chance meeting, they are drawn together for a magical day in Chicago, wandering its loneliest spaces and its most haunting views, probing their experiences as globalized minorities caught between worlds, languages and cultures. What emerges through words is a tragic secret and the reality of their feelings for each other. Silhouettes is a new chapter in the American love story — unusual because it confronts issues of race, identity and culture head on, with a view to representing ethnic characters in the full breadth of their complexity and experience.
Tell me more about yourself; how did you develop an interest in filmmaking?
My story is one which is not uncommon these days: I am an Indian who grew up in Southeast Asia, went to British school, and have spent most of my adult life in North America. After attending the MFA Program in Film at Columbia College, Chicago, I was film critic-at-large at the Daily Southtown newspaper, a subsidiary of The Chicago Sun-Times. The Quiet, my first feature film, premiered at the Art Institute of Chicago and was named Best Independent Film by Chicago Screen Magazine. Related to my interests, I am currently part of the Master of Arts Program in the Humanities at the University of Chicago where I am focusing on the intersection of culture and identity. Silhouettes is, in many ways, a direct result of my research in new imaginaries and possibilities for people who defy categories.
What do you think is missing with regards to South Asians and their representation in film, TV, and popular culture in the U.S.?
Our history in this country stretches back to the 19th century when Punjabis started arriving in the Sacramento Valley and the San Joaquin Valley after braving a 30 day journey by sea from the subcontinent. That’s an awful long time to be in a country and still not see representations of your group in mainstream media. I’ve talked to Indian actors who still see their ethnicity as a burden and live in hope that they can pass for other races. After all this time, we haven’t had a single leading role for a South Asian in a major American or English film that didn’t define its character entirely by his or her ethnicity. The ethnic frame is a vice that denies characters psychological complexity, the ability to engage with the world fully and to be recognized as free agents.
I believe that Indians and Pakistanis and Asians in general can function as universal characters who can embody the human experience — just as English and American characters do. Akira Kurosawa and Satyajit Ray blazed the trail in the late 50s and early 60s when they won the Venice and Cannes Film Festivals. The Chinese 5th generation filmmakers followed up with some wonderful films. But succeeding generations haven’t built on this legacy — we’re devolving into formula films and Bollywood extravaganzas which aren’t really serving any real aesthetic enterprise. The Hamlet and the King Lear of the future will be Asian or African, I’m convinced. I think people in America or Europe will accept seeing Asians as universal characters and ultimately come to think of this as normative.
How does your film challenge cultural and religious stereotypes?
We have a strong, independent Muslim female who isn’t constrained by her identity — she isn’t reduced to being pious or victimized or radical. Instead, we’ve given her the range and registers of any Western character — humor, sexuality, independence and intelligence. I think the other characters similarly break out of the reductive parameters that American films often put minorities in.
I think South Asian films and filmmakers have to be careful about employing the same tropes and themes in dealing with the subcontinent as Western filmmakers (stories about arranged marriages or dire poverty, for example) because it becomes confining; it makes them an aestheticised, exoticised other that isn’t useful in advancing the identity of Asians.
And filmmakers have an especially tough time depicting South Asian women. Invariably, they come across as submissive or petulant or even caricatures. Consider that even a lauded film like Gandhi doesnt have a single substantial Indian woman character in it — not even the great Indian independence leader, Sarojini Naidu, who become the President of the Indian National Congress and was critical in the fight against colonialism. The same is true of otherwise fine films like Avi Nesher’s Turn Left at the End of the World or Hanif Kuresihi’s My Son, The Terrorist to say nothing about how women are treated as window dressing in Bollywood films. Considering the remarkable accomplishments of women like Gayatri Spivak, Kiran Mazumdar Shaw and Arundhati Roy, there is a great need for films that can depict South Asian women in all of their complexity and intelligence.
What makes your film different?
Silhouettes is an honest meditation on how South Asian women balance the extraordinary expectations placed on them with their need to form and assert their own identities — women caught between cultures, languages and countries. What’s unique about the film is that it is seeking to introduce a new kind of South Asian woman to American screens — characters who are cosmopolitan, with lots of cultural capital and political agency. In addition, it was important in the wake of all the anti-Islamic rhetoric in the States, to create a new kind of Muslim character — a woman of extraordinary confidence, wordliness, humor and a deep connection to her Muslim roots. And the film confronts taboo issues like the fetishism around skin color, and the ostracism that comes when a woman defies her community’s assigned roles.
Related posts:
