The Queen of My Dreams (2023) dir. Fawzia Mirza

SIGNATURE MOVE (2017) dir. Jennifer Reeder Zaynab, a thirty-something Pakistani, Muslim, lesbian in Chicago takes care of her TV-obsessed mother Parveen. As Zaynab falls for Alma, a bold and very bright Mexican woman, she searches for her identity in life, love and wrestling. (link in title)

4/27/24

THE QUEEN OF MY DREAMS, directed by Fawzia Mirza, 2023.

MSPIFF 2024 Volume 3

Are you ready for Volume 3 of reviews from the 43rd Minneapolis St. Paul International Film Festival?

The largest annual celebration of international cinema in the region MSPIFF43 Volume 3 Writing about film for more than ten years has allowed me to cover movies from blockbusters to indies. It’s also given me the privilege of attending major events like TIFF in Toronto and Sundance in Utah.  While traveling around the country is nice, it’s the ultimate thrill to be on my home turf, proudly…

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THE QUEEN OF MY DREAMS - TEASER TRAILER

"Connected through a shared love of Bollywood, a distant mother and daughter come of age in two different eras."

Signature Move (2017)

I remember Jennifer Reeder’s surrealist high school melodrama Knives & Skin harshly dividing the audience at Overlook Film Fest in 2019, with the more macho Horror Bros in the crowd grumbling that it was the worst film they’d seen all fest and with other scattered weirdos gushing that it was the best.  Personally, I dug it, especially for the way it warped the teen-friendly Lynchian melodrama of…

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Along with my dear colleagues, Fawzia Mirza and Andria Wilson Mirza, I am proudly executive producing a beautiful new feature documentary -- COMING AROUND -- a rare film that centers and affirms the lives of queer Muslims.

Now in post-production, we've partnered with OUTFEST LA to present an advanced rough cut of the film as a special Work-in-Progress event to gather feedback and to garner interest from completion partners. 

Stay close for more news and updates on this exciting project - we are aiming for a 2023 world premiere! -- Marc Smolowitz, 13th Gen 💜🏳️‍🌈🎬

ABOUT THE FILM

COMING AROUND centers Eman, a queer Muslim woman, and Palestinian-Egyptian scholar and activist living in Brooklyn, NY. She finds herself grappling with the decision to come out to her devoutly religious mother and navigate the expectations of all sides of her identity. The film unfolds through intimate vérité scenes following Eman and her mother from Brooklyn, to Columbus, Missouri, to the United Arab Emirates, weaving in and out of their separate but deeply connected lives.

boo have you seen Polarized trailer? it looks sooo good and one of the main character is muslim--always nice to see representation 🥰 can't wait for it to hit streaming service

Ohhh, hmm, I had, but when I went to look right now, I think I might have watched an older one. This has a bit more detail:

Gonna be honest, the first trailer had this bit too, but when the white girl said "Do you?", ohhh, my hackles went up. That's so loaded, how do you come back from that?? But, it is Shamim Sharif, so I will give it a chance.

And yes, nice to see Muslim rep, and I guess I can't really be like, oh, I want lighter rep when I just posted about Bottoms--well, I can say I want more Muslim rep to be lighter, but we do have Fawzia Mirza's stuff (and probably other indie works I'm not paying attention to) and at least this is more a romance than a tragedy, so.

Exclusive Interview: Fawzia Mirza on her feature debut The Queen of My Dreams "through creating art I've found healing"

One of the LGBTQ+ highlights at last month’s 48th Toronto International Film Festival was the feature debut of writer-director Fawzia Mirza, The Queen of My Dreams, based on the filmmaker’s 2012 debut short of the same name. It’s a vibrant, blissful, and emotionally cathartic comedy drama that spans thirty years in the life of a Pakistani-Canadian family with fantasy, Bollywood-inspired…

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Assistir Filme Signature Move Online fácil

Assistir Filme Signature Move Online Fácil é só aqui: https://filmesonlinefacil.com/filme/signature-move/

Signature Move - Filmes Online Fácil

Na casa dos 30 anos, Zaynab (Fawzia Mirza) é uma advogada paquistanesa, muçulmana e lésbica que mora em Chicago. Parveen (Shabana Azmi), sua mãe que recentemente ficou viúva, acabou de se mudar para sua casa e passa os dias assistindo TV e procurando um marido para a filha única. Zaynab se apaixona por Alma (Sari Sanchez), uma mexicana arrojada e brilhante. Rosa, mãe de Alma é uma ex-lutadora, o que encanta Zaynab, que pratica luta livre. Zaynab tenta esconder da mãe a sua vida amorosa e aos aulas de luta que realiza.

ASATA Community Building

ASATA members gather in Dover Park in Oakland for an Eid Celebration. May 2022. 

As we continue to deal with the isolation caused by the ongoing pandemic, ASATA looks for ways to reconnect with one another through arts and culture. We understand that building trusted relationships is an important part of political power building so that we can show up in formation in times of crisis and win campaigns. To that end, ASATA formed a Community Building working group that has hosted book club meetings, co-sponsored film screenings, and organized park picnics to support COVID-safe in-person gatherings. 

The first book club story we chose was Dark Spaces on the Map, by Anjali Sachdeva. In this work of science fiction, a cultural anthropologist works with a 107-year-old woman to "neural harvest" her memories from the bygone era, one where men used to exist. The older woman entertains this project, but struggles with how to explain, or whether to carefully hide, a shameful memory. As a trigger warning, the story involves an implied incident of gender-based violence. Here is a link to a free podcast episode where LeVar Burton reads the story, which is about 50 minutes long. In April of 2022, Our friends at Lavender Pheonix invited us to co-sponsor a film screening at Understory as part of their Solidarity Cinema series. We picked  Signature Move, a queer film by Jennifer Reeder. The film is about Zaynab (Fawzia Mirza), a thirty-something Pakistani, Muslim, lesbian in Chicago who takes care of her TV-obsessed mother Parveen (Shabana Azmi). As Zaynab falls for Alma (Sari Sanchez), a bold and very bright Mexican woman, she searches for her identity in life, love and wrestling.

In May, ASATA co-sponsored the CAAMfest screening of In Search of Bengali Harlem  which 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. We look forward to co-creating more spaces for celebrating our diverse communities productions of arts and culture while advancing our political education.

Film still from In Search of Bengali Harlem.