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  • Japan Premiere

Competition

No Land's Man

Director: Mostofa Sarwar Farooki

2021|USA, India, Bangladesh, Australia|101min|Language: English, Hindi, Urdu, Bangla, French|Subtitles: English, Japanese

Date Time Venue
3/13 Sun 21:10 Umeda Burg 7: Theater7
3/16 Wed 14:50 ABC Hall
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Starring
Nawazuddin SIDDIQUI
Megan MITCHELL
Tahsan KHAN
Eisha CHOPRA
Kiran KHOJE
Vikram KOCHHAR
Synopsis

In a search for a positive future in an intolerant world, a man has to escape his background but the personal cost of a life of deception is high in this topical drama spanning three continents and starring Indian A-lister Nawazuddin SIDDIQUI (The Lunchbox, 2013).

The story begins in Sydney, Australia, in 2019 as a woman named Cathy (Megan MITCHELL) finds that her boyfriend Naveen (Nawazuddin SIDDIQUI) has vanished while travelling with her. As she searches for the missing man, the story moves back two years in the past to introduce him as he arrives in New York and meets her for the first time. Something of a romantic movie takes place as we watch their courtship but underlying their sweet moments is his disappearance and the lies he spins about his name, nationality, religion, and family. The film’s daring structure and its grounding in real-world persecution gives it the twists to keep a viewer engaged.

[Jason MAHER]

Director's Message

I only know one of way of making films. I like to give a cinematic interpretation of some personal feelings. My personal experience related to the trauma an identity can bring has played a crucial role in the way I think and look at the world. I was born in Naokhali, located in the southern part of Bangladesh. People from this area have been heavily trolled for years. So, from a very early age, I came to realize I will have to find ways to protect myself from being trolled! I would keep lying about where I was from to protect myself. I would never bring any of my schoolmates to our home lest they catch where we were from when they detect my parents' dialect. As I grew older I began to see how it impacts our minds, how it creates a hole in our hearts when we can't be known as who we are, we can't be accepted as who we are, we can't feel comfortable as who we are.

We begin to take shelter in fantasies, in lies. This is us humans' creative reply to the discrimination a grim world offers us! This has influenced my body of work in some way or other. In No Land’s Man, those childhood feelings of mine helped me to associate myself with the pain of the central character Naveen Cheema. In real life, I don't come from an Ahmadi family. I come from a Sunni family. It is the Sunnis who oppress the Ahmadis. I have Ahmadi friends in my neighborhood. We grew up together in perfect harmony. But in the last couple of decades, we started to see how they are attacked. The very idea of this film started to grow in my mind when my childhood friend Nizam's mother died. I saw them moving from one graveyard to another since Sunni extremists started an angry movement which called for a ban on Ahmadi people to be buried in any graveyard. I couldn't look at Nizam's helpless face. The unnerving feelings have stayed with me and hence have given birth to this film. However, I tried not to make a film only on the plight of the Ahmadis but tried to make a film that can portray a helpless world where no one can feel safe, a world which is brought together by communication technology but torn apart by intolerance! But to me, this is not a film about despair but instead this is a film about hope! Like the ending of the film, the world breathes when we have empathy in our hearts!

Director: Mostofa Sarwar Farooki