PART TWO OF THREE
In Part One of our profile of filmmaker Nijla Mu’min, we traced the origins of a cinematic vision rooted in the African-American Muslim community of the East Bay, and followed her debut feature Jinn as it opened new possibilities for Black Muslim storytelling on screen. That film arrived like a train that never stopped, as Mu’min puts it. The next one has been a different kind of journey. 
For fifteen years, Mu’min has been trying to bring Noor to the world: a story about Black-Palestinian solidarity told through an intimate love story set in a Brooklyn bodega. The accolades have been extraordinary. The resistance has been just as formidable. What it means to keep making something the industry keeps refusing to hold, that is what Part Two is about.
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Noor: Bridging Brooklyn and Palestine
If Jinn explores the fragile, airy terrain of growing up as a Black and Muslim girl, Noor carries that exploration into the more cutthroat world of adulthood. Mu’min’s short film follows a Black woman who forms a deep connection with an Arab man at her neighborhood bodega in the wake of an unexpected tragedy.
The script gained significant recognition well before its life on screen: it won the Grand Jury Prize for Best Screenplay at the 2014 Urbanworld Film Festival presented by BET, was selected for the Sundance Screenwriters Intensive and Sundance Film 2 Lab, landed on both The Black List and The Muslim List, and was chosen as a winner of the 2020 Athena List, an annual competition that elevates scripts with women at the center of the story.
You can’t help but notice the weight that the names of these two films carry. Jinn and Noor reach toward both the worldly and the otherworldly. But the journey between them, in terms of production, was very different.
“Jinn had a shorter turnaround production time because it can take a long time to get feature films made, especially independent ones like this. But once Jinn was on its way, it never stopped. It was like a train that kept going. Once the script was done, I sent it to my producer, we put the Kickstarter out, we pitched and got investors, and we made the film. You know, it won many awards at the South by Southwest Festival,” Mu’min explains.
“With Noor, it’s been a 15-year journey, with stops and starts, lots of successes with the accolades it’s wrapped up, at Sundance, The Black List, The Muslim List, and several grants from the Islamic Scholarship Fund. But in this particular moment of trying to make Noor, I’m kind of at a loss. It’s been very, very, very difficult trying to make the feature film, which is the ultimate goal. We made a short, but it’s just been a lot. It’s been a lot of rejection, a lot of silence, a lot of lack of support, even though I’m very, very grateful for the support we’ve gotten.
“The people who have lifted it, who wanted to program it, a lot of festivals have not wanted to show the film. A lot of Muslim organizations did not want to show the film. This has been a very hard experience for me, and I’m still trying to make sense of what direction to go with the film at this point, just because we’re in a time where there’s a lot of fear and not a lot of support for certain stories that go outside the lines of what is celebrated right now.”
Noor’s resistance to easy categorization is part of what makes it so tenacious. The film explores Black-Palestinian solidarity through an intimate love story, a lineage that recalls Mississippi Masala, Mira Nair’s 1991 film about a romance across the Black and South Asian diaspora. That Nair’s son, Zohran Mamdani, is now the mayor of New York City feels, in this moment, less like coincidence than continuity: communities that have long found solidarity are now seeing that solidarity reflected in the city’s own leadership.
“…holding space for them is a radical act,”
In the context of Israel’s ongoing military campaign in Gaza, which has claimed over 70,000 Palestinian lives, devastated Gaza’s civilian infrastructure, and continued the seizure and dispossession of Palestinians in the West Bank and occupied East Jerusalem, and amid Trump administration policies that have targeted immigrant communities domestically, the film’s core question is urgent. I asked Mu’min how Noor teaches us to understand love amid pain, confusion, and hardship.
“I do feel like the project in this current time is encouraging a certain empathy that we’re missing, that is needed. Having love and empathy for another person or another group of people who are suffering differently but also similarly to your suffering, that is rooted in state-sanctioned violence and the resisting of that across different communities. I do think it’s very timely, because what we’re seeing right now is that no one can turn the world. Everybody is being targeted. This film is really at the core of that.”
“These two characters falling in love puts them in a place of empathy, and really holding up each other. And, of course, we don’t have the answers for everyone’s issue or problem or struggle, but holding space for them is a radical act,” Mu’min says.
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Continues in Part Three
Noor asks what it means to love across difference. In Part Three, we turn to a film that asks what it means to grieve. Water Angel, Mu’min’s most recent work, confronts the Black maternal health crisis with the same tender ferocity she has always brought to the unseen. We also trace the production company, named for her grandmother’s kitchen, that holds all of these worlds together. Read Part Three here.
Adama Juldeh Munu is an award-winning journalist and producer for TRT World. Her work has been published by Al Jazeera, HuffPost, Middle East Eye, the New Arab, and Black Ballad. She writes about race, Black heritage, and issues connecting Islam and the African diaspora.
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