LOS ANGELES – After months of listening to President Trump’s anti-Muslim rhetoric, a team of filmmakers have decided to intervene and create a new documentary titled “An Act of Worship”, in a bid to capture the beauty and pain driving a new young generation of Muslim activists around the nation who are springing to action.
The team for the upcoming documentary includes Oscar-nominated cinematographer Nausheen Dadabhoy, who tried to capture the nation’s protests in JFK and LAX against President’s Trump’s executive order banning travel from some Muslim countries, perceived by many as a Muslim ban.
The team first partnered with Field of Vision, landing the premiere episode for the “Our 100 Days Series,” and putting a direct spotlight on the aftermath of the Muslim Ban.
An Act of Worship from Capital K Pictures on Vimeo.
“The film started in California because I grew up there, and where my sister, Fatima Dadabhoy worked as the civil rights attorney for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) Los Angeles chapter, and so that was the first place I started,” Dadabhoy told Huff Post.
“I also happened to be in LA when the executive order was announced and all the protests started. So to a degree it was perfect timing.
“We actually had started thinking about this film right after the election, and I had already approached CAIR-LA, because many Muslims were pretty nervous after the Trump win.”
The project focuses on Muslim activism during the Trump presidency and the diversity of the Muslim experience in the country.
“Our community is really scared right now. The short film is a good way for us to introduce ourselves to the community,” she said.
“We always intended to do a feature, and it was going to be this larger look at life for Muslim-Americans under the first year of the Trump administration.”
American Muslims are a diverse and growing population, currently estimated at 3.35 million people of all ages, including 2.05 million adults, according to a research released in July 2017 by Pew Research Center.
Last month, Pew released a survey that showed 48% of Muslims said they had faced some form of discrimination in the last year, such as name-calling or threats.
The survey, which questioned about 1,000 US Muslims from January through May, also found that 74 percent viewed President Trump as unfriendly.