A Festival Built So Muslim Filmmakers Can Tell Their Own Stories

The New York Muslim Film Festival launches October 11 at Manhattan's SVA Theatre, billed as the city's first festival for Muslim filmmakers. It positions itself as an answer to the flattened, stereotyped picture of Muslims that Western media, in the festival's framing, often traffics in — and its aim is for those filmmakers to tell their own stories rather than be described from outside. The framing is doing as much work as the lineup: a festival that names the portrayals it is reacting against is also making a claim about who gets to be unremarkable on screen.