Mogul Mowgli

So Bassam Tariq, who directed this, I love the backstory, and I think it's important to know as we talk about.

A, he directed a film called Mogul Mowgli that was our opening film at Bentonville, like, five or six years ago.

Mm-hmm.

He's a really interesting filmmaker, and we talked about him here a few years later when he was announced as the director of Blade starring the same Mahershala Ali.

Welcome to the American Cinematheque Podcast, the show where guests program the film festival of their lives.

Joining us today is a director who you know from the films These Birds Walk, Mogul Mowgli, and in theaters now, Your Mother, Your Mother, Your Mother.

Programming the Bassam Tariq Film Festival, it's Bassam Tariq.

[laughs] A pleasure to be here, man.

We just had the amazing-

Mm

... opening of Beyond Fest at the Aero Theatre, and I felt like you were very, of, immediately present, took the stage differently than a lot of directors, where you were doing some of the housekeeping for us.

You were like, "There's room downstairs, down seat if you wanna sit here."

It opens wide across the country October 16th.

None of this might be happening for Tariq, whose other releases such as the Netflix short documentary Ghosts of Sugar Land, the indie feature Mogul Mowgli with Riz Ahmed, and the Prime series Bait, which he co-directed, are smaller in scope, if not for another act of misfortune.

But this one had nothing to do with breastfeeding.

In July 2021, it looked as if Tariq's filmmaking ship had come in.

Even this film, I was like, I don't know if he's going to want to do this.

You're a Muslim hitman looking for breast milk? It's totally strange on the page.

All he had seen of mine was Mogul Mowgli, which he was a fan of, thank God.

But he could have easily been, could you really pull this off? What's most unique about Tariq's films is how he creates flawed, three-dimensional, and strikingly human Muslim characters, especially Muslim men, who are far from media stereotypes.

Mogul...

Mogul Mowgli.

Mogul Mowgli? Mogul

Mowgli.

Yeah, yeah.

No.

No, no. It's Mogul.

It doesn't even come Mogul Mowgli.

And in Bassam Tariq, we've, we've definitely seen a lot of his work in the past too, and when he was hired to direct Blade, we were like, "Oh, that's interesting." Like, like, "Didn't expect that." And now after seeing Your Mother, Your Mother, Your Mother, it's kinda like, "Wow, what could have been his version of Blade?" So those are all the kinda questions going into this movie and, uh, yeah, I'm excited to talk about it.

Yeah, I think Mogul Mowgli was one of those films that, you know, we really, you know, loved when we watched it with Riz Ahmed, and when we heard that, okay, this guy's gonna be doing Blade, we're like, "Okay," like, "This is gonna be a very different take."

Yeah.

And then going into Your Mother, Your Mother, Your Mother, uh, or Yo Mama, Yo Mama, Yo Mama, it's like there's so, like, there is so much that we were like, "Oh, this is so different and what could've been?" You know what I mean? What could've been whatever direction this would've been in the MCU had they actually gone down this path, uh, would've been interesting.

You can find that on IndieWire.com.

But I think that's a film that also just has so much goodwill around it because the sort of narrative is that Basim Turek was supposed to direct Blade because he had done Mogul Mowgli.

Brian, that's the name of the film?

Yeah.