Tag: Riz Ahmed

  • Jessie, Riz to headline sci-fi romance feature Fingernails  

    By Express News Service

    Actors Jessie Buckley and Riz Ahmed will headline a sci-fi romance feature titled Fingernails. Written by Sam Steiner and Stavros Raptis, the film will be directed by Christos Nikou, who is best known for helming the 2020 Green drama Apples.

    The film is set in a world where a test has been discovered that measures whether couples are truly in love. To help couples succeed, love institutes have opened to guide them. As the official plotline reads, Anna (Buckley) is sceptical of the positive result she’s received with her longtime partner, so she starts working in a love institute as an assistant to Trevor (Ahmed), a mysterious, dedicated instructor.

    Fingernails is produced by Oscar-winner Cate Blanchett’s Dirty Films along with FilmNation Entertainment. Jerome Duboz serves as the executive producer. Buckley is best known for her performance in titles such as Wild Rose, Judy, I’m Thinking of Ending Things, and The Lost Daughter. She currently stars in Alex Garland’s Men. Ahmed, best known for Sound of Metal, recently won an Oscar for the best live-action short film for The Long Goodbye. 

  • Riz Ahmed, Lulu Wang to produce comedy series ‘Son of Good Fortune’

    By IANS

    LOS ANGELES: British-Pakistani actor Riz Ahmed and filmmaker Lulu Wang are joining hands to produce a comedy series ‘The Son of Good Fortune’.

    Based on the novel of the same name by Lysley Tenorio, the series is about an undocumented Filipino teenager in the Bay area navigating a tumultuous relationship with his former B-movie action star mother, falling in love for the first time, and working out how to pay back a massive debt before his whole life crumbles, reports variety.com.

    Andrew Lopez will adapt the book for the screen and serve as an executive producer.

    Ahmed will executive produce along with Allie Moore of Left Handed. Wang and Dani Melia executive produce for Local Time. Tenorio will serve as consulting producer, with Amazon Studios producing.

    The project is the first for Left Handed since it was announced that Ahmed and the company had signed a first-look TV deal at Amazon in January.

    He previously partnered with the streamer on the critically-acclaimed film ‘Sound of Metal’, for which Ahmed received an Oscar, BAFTA, and Golden Globe nomination for best actor.

    Wang is currently working on the series ‘Expats’, on which she is the writer, director, executive producer, and showrunner. That series is based on the novel ‘The Expatriates’ by Janice Y.K. Lee. She has previously directed and wrote the highly-regarded films ‘The Farewell’ and ‘Posthumous’.

  • Riz Ahmed slams Hollywood for ‘toxic’ portrayal of Muslims and ‘frankly racist’ movies

    By PTI
    LONDON: Oscar-nominated actor Riz Ahmed has called out Hollywood for the stereotypical and “toxic” portrayal of Muslim community in its films.

    Ahmed, who became the first Muslim to get a best actor Oscar nomination, recently launched the initiative, the Blueprint for Muslim Inclusion, to increase the community’s representation in cinema.

    The initiative was launched in partnership with the USC Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, the Ford Foundation and Pillars Fund.

    In a video posted on his social media handles, Ahmed said, “The problem with Muslim misrepresentation is one that can’t be ignored any more.”

    The 38-year-old British-Pakistani actor said it was a “bittersweet” moment for him when he was nominated at the 2021 Oscars for his performance in “Sound of Metal”.

    “I simultaneously wore that slightly dubious accolade with a sense of gratitude personally. I also felt tremendous sadness. How was it that out of 1.6 billion people – a quarter of the world’s population – none of us had ever been in this position until now? “I asked myself, if I’m the exception to the rule, what must the rule be about people like me? What must the unwritten rule be about Muslims – a quarter of the world’s population – and their place in our stories, our culture and their place in our society, if any?” Ahmed said.

    The actor asserted that the problematic portrayal of Muslims in cinema is something that cannot be fixed by a “handful of prominent Muslims in the business”.

    “The progress that’s being made by a few of us doesn’t paint an overall picture of progress if most of the portrayals of Muslims on screen are either nonexistent or entrenched in those stereotypical, toxic, two-dimensional portrayals,” he added.

    Ahmed singled out Oscar-winning movies — “American Sniper”, “The Hurt Locker” and “Argo” — as “frankly racist”.

    “(These) films dehumanise and demonise Muslim characters, insofar as they are the perpetrators or victims of violence, unworthy of empathy or incapable of empathy,” the actor said.

    Similarly, he criticised Amazon’s smash hit series “The Boys”.

    “(It is) a show that I loved and binged. A very self-aware, modern kip show. One with a gigantic cast, multi-racial multi-species. (But) I can’t tell you how gutted I was when halfway through that show Muslim’s turn up, the first and only time, to hijack a plane.”

    “Oh actually, they turn up another time in the first series, to play super-villains whose superpower is to suicide bomb people,” Ahmed said.

    Such a thing would not happen to any other minority group, the actor said, citing the example of “Black Panther”.

    “Even a film like ‘Black Panther’, one of the most woke progressive mainstream moments in our culture in recent years. And Muslims turn up in the start of that film as terrorists to kidnap school girls and then disappear,” he added.

    Alongside the release of The Blueprint for Muslim Inclusion, a study by the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, titled “Missing and Maligned”, found that Muslims rarely appear on screen, or are shown in a negative light if they do.

    It examined a total of 8,965 speaking characters across 200 top-grossing movies between 2017 and 2019 from the US, UK, Australia, and New Zealand.

    The study found that just 1.6 percent of characters were Muslim.

    They were mostly shown as outsiders, threatening or subservient, and about one-third were perpetrators of violence.

    More than half were targets of violence.