Mahnoor Euceph, a Pakistani-American writer and director, made her directorial debut with the short film “Eid Mubarak.” The short went on to win the Jury Award for Live Action Short at the New York International Children’s Film Festival, making the film Oscar-qualifying. It has played at over 40 film festivals including CAAMFest, SXSW Sydney, Tasveer, Atlanta ShortFest, and ShortShorts Film Festival & Asia, and currently holds 13 wins.The film is now officially in consideration for Best Live Action Short Film at the 96th Academy Awards. In this piece, Euceph discusses the story behind “Eid Mubarak.“
I grew up praying with my mom and sister in the Muslim way, bending in various yoga-like positions while repeating words from the Quran. When my baby brother started walking, he would watch us. At the part of the prayer where we would sit on the ground, he would climb on my mom’s back. For him the ritual was a rollercoaster ride. We would all smile at his abundant joy, but continue on in prayer. It was the cutest thing I’d ever seen.
There are almost two billion Muslims today. Muslims have universal experiences like the one I shared above, experiences that we share with two billion other people—experiences like waking up for suhoor (or sehri in Pakistan) during Ramadan (Ramzan in Pakistan) and stuffing yourself full at 3 AM half asleep, like reciting the Ayatul Kursi prayer under your breath for protection before your airplane takes off, like being poetically in love with the moon. Though these are universal experiences for so much of the world, we hardly ever see them represented on the screen—let alone depicted as such—because so often, representations of us are not done by us or for us.
When I set out to make “Eid Mubarak,” I wanted to make a film about a universal Muslim experience by us and for us, through an American sensibility. I immigrated to Los Angeles at the age of eight from Pakistan. Since then, I went to art…
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