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| May 2, 2006 | Tuesday | Rabi-us-Sani 3, 1427 |
Film on Pakistani vendor to be released this year
NEW YORK, May 1: A film about a Pakistani pushcart vendor’s life in post-9/11 New York made by an Iranian-American director, has earned rave reviews here and it will be released nationwide in fall of this year, a news report said on Sunday.
The film, ‘Man Pushcart’, was produced by writer/director Ramin Bahrani who is influenced by the Italian neo-realist movement and the American New Wave of the 1970’s.
“The idea of national cinema doesn’t make sense the way it used to,” Bahrani told the New York Times in an interview. “I find it frustrating when people expect a certain country to produce a certain kind of cinema. There’s economic and cultural globalization, but also physical mobility. People move around more.”
In the review Times writer Stephen Holden said: “The murky neorealist film ‘Man Pushcart’ follows the gruelling routine of Ahmad (Ahmad Razvi), a Pakistani immigrant who rises before dawn to stock his metal pushcart with coffee, bagels and doughnuts, which he tows by hand to a Midtown Manhattan street corner, overlooked by the imperial spire of the Chrysler Building.
“A former pop-star in his homeland, Ahmad recently lost his wife and now lives in Brooklyn. Exactly why he immigrated to America is never clearly spelled out, but he occupies a tiny Brooklyn apartment, too small to house his young son who lives with his hostile in-laws. Some financial relief appears when Mohammad (Charles Daniel Sandoval), a slippery Pakistani businessman, offers Ahmad work fixing up his new apartment, along with empty promises to help him resurrect his musical career.
“A casual relationship with Noemi (Leticia Dolera), a Spanish woman temporarily working at her family’s news-stand, develops into a tentative romance. But opportunities are only straws in the wind.
“In its hard, gritty vision of New York life at street-level, the movie aspires to be an American-South Asian ‘Bicycle Thief’. It’s two-thirds successful.”
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