Naz & Maalik Trailer from Wolfe Video on Vimeo.
If the goal was to sow chaos, engender distrust among others, all the while piercing America’s sense of impenetrability once again, then those responsible for the downing of the World Trade Towers succeeded spectacularly. The carnage on that crisp, cool late summer day marked a line between who we were as a nation and who we would become. And we became as a people unlike anything that had come before. While America has had its routine lapses into psychotic buffoonery – the Red Scare of the late 1910s, the McCarthy purges of the 1950s – the attack Sept. 11 was a whole other beast entirely.
Almost immediately, a wholesale assault on our individual liberties ensued. We were warned by Ari Fleischer, President Bush’s press secretary at the time, to “watch what we say.” A system of national alerts, codified in Crayola crayon colors, frequently and disingenuously elevated toward the red end of the scale during times not of national peril but political peril, became our guides to safety. Posters were hung in public spaces, but especially in New York, advising us vaguely and ominously that if “we see something, say something.”
And nowhere did that sense of increasing isolation land more squarely than on the backs of Muslims living in the United States. After all, the men who flew the planes into the World Trade Center were of Saudi descent, home to some of the most barbaric strains of Islam. But for Muslims who came to America (or anyone closely resembling them) and who were, by and large, peace-loving and family-centered, what followed was a collective assault on their very right to exist within our borders.
Now a new picture from director Jay Dockendorf titled Naz & Maalik attempts to explore this sense of otherness and cultural isolation as seen through the prism of two gay black Muslim teens during the course of a Brooklyn summer day in the period shortly after 9/11. The film, which opened in New York Jan. 22, is now available on video and VOD by Wolfe Video.. The movie has already racked up some impressive wins on the indie film festival circuit. Naz & Maalik was awarded the IWC Award from the Tribeca Film Institute in 2014, voted Best LGBT Movie at the Nashville Film Festival and its two stars, Curtiss Cook Jr. and Kerwin Johnson Jr., scored impressive wins for the Jury Award for Best Actors in a U.S. Dramatic Feature at OUTFEST Los Angeles.
“This is a poignant and really unsettling story that rippled through the press about the surveillance of Muslims. In New Jersey, New York and Connecticut, various communities that one would necessarily think whatsoever deserved surveillance like college youth groups and highs school clubs and the inside of mosques during sermons with undercover agents,” explains Dorkendorf. He reinforced his point by reminding me that the Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting for that year went to Matt Apuzzo, Adam Goldman, Eileen Sullivan and Chris Hawley of the Associated Press for their report spotlighting the New York Police Department’s clandestine spying program that monitored daily life in Muslim communities. (According the Pulitzer Web site, the investigation resulted in “congressional calls for a federal investigation, and a debate over the proper role of domestic intelligence gathering.”)
Jay explained that he first came to the story by way of Craigslist. “I moved in with a man through a random Craigslist sublet arrangement. He was still closeted to his family at the time. He lived with his boyfriend at the apartment and we became friends. I asked him if I could interview him for the basis of the screenplay and he agreed. So living in Brooklyn at that time, where an enormous amount of surveillance took place, the story fused into my mind into the script that I wrote.”
But if surveillance is the anchor upon which Naz & Maalik rests than the complicated relationship between the two main characters is its vessel. We watch the two, whose chemistry is palpable, counseling each other on matters religious and secular while not hawking lotto tickets on the streets. Once their chemistry is establish early on in the film, their respective stages of coming out become apparent and, given both Naz’s and Maalik’s unique relationship with Islam and the emotionally raw teen feelings visiting upon them, it’s no surprise that their relationship is central to and the emotional core of Dorkendorf’s meditation.
Kerwin Johnson Jr.
I asked Kerwin Johnson Jr., who like his onscreen counterpart is softer and more introspective than Cook, about his family’s reaction to the role. “Yes, my family is actually very supportive. When we had a showing in Texas, my family came out,” Kerwin beams. (That baby on the couch in friend Dan’s apartment? His little cousin.)
And because no one is more qualified to talk about race than two white men, I did probe to see if all the heavies in the cast – The FBI agent, the cop and the yuppie – were intentionally white. “The casting of those characters was color-blind.” (Personally, I thought it was effective though not intentionally. I mean, for a lot of black people, a lot of white people represent the three character flaws in each them: incompetence (the FBI Agent), greed (the Yuppie) and corruption (the cop).
The problem with these kinds of interviews – punctual, short and inherently limited – is that a decision has to be made. Do you delve deeply into a few matters or pepper your interview subjects with a rapid-fire series questions and see what sticks. I chose the latter. So if this seems random, it’s probably because, having seen Naz & Maalik, there’s so much to examine. Ironic, don’t you think, given how absent thoughtful examination was in the days, months and years to follow after the felling of the World Trade Towers.
Buy or rent Naz & Maalik here.
