The Muslim House offers an island in the narrative sea for a plucky crew of filmmakers and storytellers accustomed to sailing into storms pretty much all alone.
For two days on Main Street, the organizations behind the lounge that has set up shop at recent Sundance Film Festivals hosted this safe space for perhaps Hollywood’s tiniest, most threatened and stereotyped minority. Here they could gather, celebrate, commiserate and support each other in community.
“I see the future as very bright,” Rohi Mirza, a film producer and the founder of marketing firm Box Office Guru, said in a panel discussion on Monday. “Twenty-five years ago.” She shrugged. “It was tough.”
Not that it isn’t still tough, especially today, echoing an era after 9/11 in a society plagued by Islamophobia and stories rife with Muslim characters who have long shown up, if at all, as terrorists, villains, fanatics and their abused wives and abandoned children.
But there’s a growing undercurrent in stories universal to humanity that star and/or are written, directed, produced and filmed by people who just happen to be Muslim making their way to Sundance and other film festivals, television, streaming platforms and movie theaters.
A testament to such progress, halting as it may be and vulnerable to the greater ebbs and flows in the general filmmaking industry, showed up in the 200 or so storytellers and supporters who came this year to The Muslim House set up in the second-floor Pinecone Ridge space for speakers, panels, movie watching, networking — and as more than one attendee jokingly suggested, for breakfast, best on the block.
There’s another nod to the presence of The Muslim House at Sundance, besides the space packed with filmmakers from the culture, in the 2026 festival offerings such as “American Doctor,” “Everyone to Kenmure Street,” “Hanging by a Wire,” “One in a Million,” “Knife: The Attempted Murder of Salman Rushdie,” “All That’s Left of You,” “Where To?” “Who Killed Alex Odeh?” and “The Friend’s House is Here,” which was barely smuggled out of Iran in time for Sundance.
That’s at least 10% of the 90 films selected for this year’s festival from 4,255 feature-length submissions.
By this measure, you could say Muslim filmmakers are punching above their weight. America’s Muslim population makes up 1.1% of the total, according to the Pew Research Center. Their demographics run close to the mean among all Americans, though skewing a bit younger, with larger families, and showing less income among the poor. While American Muslims lean more Democratic in their politics, their patriotic feeling, religious practices and concern about terrorism match wider America as well.
Most who have immigrated to the United States come from South Asia, and most born in America are Black Muslims, a group that has been here since before the United States existed. But three-quarters were born in another country or are the children of immigrants.
Comedian, actor, writer, filmmaker Aizzah Fatima, a Pakistani American born in Saudi Arabia and raised in Mississippi, once auditioned for “Terrorist No. 2’s girlfriend,” she told The Guardian newspaper. Around 2011, she developed her one-woman show, “Dirty Paki Lingerie,” which evolved into the film “Americanish,” billed as the first Muslim-American rom-com. More to the point, though, it aimed for a truer, more nuanced representation of Pakistani American women. And it is very, very funny, if her standup at The Muslim House on Monday is any indication.
She and others on panels and in conversation credited Sue Obeidi as the force in Hollywood who perhaps more than anyone has advanced their careers and achieved gains in how Muslims are portrayed onscreen. The senior vice president of the Muslim Public Affairs Council is the founding leader of the MPAC Hollywood Bureau, which started The Muslim House in 2021. By 2024, the organization had received a grant from the Doris Duke Foundation that helped evaluate and expand the programming at the Sundance Film Festival, SXSW, and Tribeca.
Fatima referred to Obeidi as the fairy godmother from the Muslim world who encouraged her when “the support within the Muslim community didn’t exist for this work.” She didn’t dare tell her parents and was mortified when her father found out through the ’book, as he called it — “TikTok for older people who like to read,” she explained to laughter.
“Sue’s been there throughout the whole journey from the beginning, and I have to say things have changed so much over the years,” Fatima said. “I was recently on an episode of ‘Law and Order,’ and as a Muslim woman, I didn’t even have to get honor killed. I just played a boring doctor named Anne Marie Mercer. It was very exciting … for my parents.”
Progress, though, shouldn’t be confused with arrival into full acceptance, and the forces against Muslims in the industry remain daunting.
Fellow panelist Effie T. Brown, a producer as well as Gamechanger Films’ CEO, felt bleaker about the current environment for Black and Muslim filmmaking.
“The white boys in the studios now are having a tough time,” she said. Which only means marginalized filmmakers will have a tougher time. “Things are constricting now. They’re coming for all of us.”
Eyes narrowing, she wasn’t defeatist about her observations. The key is supporting one another, she said. That’s where the power of the filmmakers represented in The Muslim House comes from, she said.
“F this, let’s create our own table,” said “Hanging by a Wire” producer Mo Naqvi, another member of that panel. He said he had long ago grown weary of trying to break in and stay acceptable with the dominant studios.
“Let’s make our own films, and also make pathways for the kids coming behind us,” he exhorted.
Earlier in the discussion, he said, “I’m done explaining myself to these people” while talking about his roots growing up in Pakistan and making his way in America’s film industry, in which he’s won many awards, including at least one Emmy for his mainstream work.
“You can definitely see the larger news organizations or film people, whatever kind of framing it is, in a more ‘no, no, all Muslims are bad,’” he said, while talking about his film about a gondola car with school kids stuck 900 feet high between villages in rural Pakistan. “They don’t have that nuance. And so it almost was necessary for me to jump in and take those stories and actually shed more nuance and honesty to you. And so that’s what I did.”
Muslims make up a tiny sliver of America’s population, but that’s still around an estimated 4 million people. An audience of its own, in other words.
Reaching these audiences, niche as well as broadly across America, comes down to strong storytelling, a truism among independent artists supported by research, said Sohad Murrar, Ph.D., a professor and scholar at the University of Illinois, Chicago.
“There have been two things that, for me, have emerged across all of the panels at Muslim House — the first theme being that we need authentic stories, and the second theme being that these stories that we tell and the narratives that are portrayed in our entertainment media, they penetrate people’s hearts,” she said. “I would argue that that’s actually the baseline, like that’s actually very basic. That’s not profound. What we actually need to be doing is pushing the envelope and going one step further and asking ourselves: How do stories penetrate people’s hearts? What actually is happening that it penetrates people’s hearts?”
Yet that’s not enough, either, she and other panelists acknowledged. Murrar, a Palestinian American, has been acutely aware of the situation in Gaza and the West Bank almost since she was born. Not recognizing her family, friends or herself in news and entertainment media inspired her career in studying bias and how best to correct it.
“I’ve been thinking about this quite a lot, because I think when it comes to the public narrative around Palestine, we are in an unprecedented time. Public opinion of Palestine has shifted pretty dramatically,” she said to a question from the audience. “It’s absolutely wild how much we’ve changed. And yet, at the same exact time, the situation in Palestine is objectively getting worse.”
She counseled patience, painful as that may be after decades of practicing the virtue.
“So what bearing do these narratives actually have and this individual-level change when the structures and the powers that be continue to propagate whatever agendas they want to?” she said. “I think it’s very difficult, because it’s hard when you want to see the change happen. But change is incremental. Social change has to be incremental. On some level it shouldn’t be, when there’s very clear moral right and moral wrong, right? But it’s just how we function as humans. And it will take time.”
“We really want to see change immediately, and it’s not necessarily how it’s going to happen, and we just have to brace ourselves for that,” she added.
So the metaphor holds: Storytelling works something like water, that drip on a rock, that coalescence of drops forming a narrative sea. And forces like Obeidi and Muslim House encouraging more brave souls to venture out and try their luck, and then maybe come back and share what they have learned, ever more possibly as a Sundance entry.
