Sami’s story is indicative of countless Asian and South-Asian immigrant journeys of the 1970s and beyond - coming to America with the promise and potential for prosperity, only to hustle at the bottom within self-created communities in order to survive. He moves in with a jovial Pakistani immigrant, Babu (Rizwan Manji), and his dozen or so other roommates in a cramped apartment as he plots his way to become a “professional American.” Still from 'The Tiger Hunter.' (Courtesy of the filmmaker) Sami first touches down in the States with the promise of an engineering position at a Chicago manufacturing firm, only to quickly realize the offer has expired. What takes the fore instead is the rare depiction of a generation of immigrants’ untold struggles. “I wanted to humanize, and have a real portrayal of a Muslim character.” “I always wanted to make a story having a Muslim character in which that wasn’t the defining part of his story,” Khan says. The Tiger Hunter doesn't exploit or sensationalize Sami’s Muslim identity - in fact, the detail is barely implied. It took film festival screenings, such as one in Austin where “Southern dudes” filled theater seats, for Khan to expel these internalized doubts. And because Muslim characters are often absent, or flatly stereotyped on screen, Khan worried that a story featuring multi-dimensional Muslims at its center would be unwanted. Having always seen film as a vehicle for social activism, Khan understands the importance of media representation in combating misguided perceptions, especially in such a fraught time. “And I didn’t think actually think that Muslim bans or Muslim registries or anything like that would be serious conversation.” “I was among the people who thought that Donald Trump was never going to become president,” says the 31-year-old filmmaker. In this context, the romantic comedy can feel like an inadvertent rebuttal within the ongoing national debate surrounding Muslim immigration.īut Khan, herself Muslim-American, never imagined the current political circumstances that have propelled her film into an unavoidably symbolic work. The Tiger Hunter, the opening night film for the Center for Asian American Media's annual film festival (CAAMFest), could not arrive at a more pertinent and fragile moment.Ĭoming to San Francisco on the heels of President Trump’s most recent travel ban on six predominantly Muslim countries, the feature film debut from writer and director Lena Khan tells the story of Sami (Danny Pudi of Community fame), a Muslim-Indian who immigrates to America in the 1970s in search of a better life.

The tiger hunter film