On the eve of the 2016 election, a group of first-generation high school students from a Bangladeshi Muslim community in Hudson, NY are thrust into a complex web. For the next six years, six teenagers Mahmuda, Jahed, Ramisa, Saddique, Farzana, and Jabin confront xenophobia, the cost of forbidden love, identity struggles, and their conservative parents' idea of the American Dream. Hudson, New York saw an influx of Bangladeshi immigrants in the mid-1990s come to work as low-wage laborers in a button factory that closed on the eve of September 11. Both the scarcity of manufacturing jobs and the post-9/11 Islamophobia in America left the Bangladeshi community devastated. Anti-Muslim rhetoric hung over the older generation as they struggled to support their growing families while becoming increasingly insular. Meanwhile, the younger generation is college-bound with scholarships and sees themselves as young ambassadors of Islam. But in the wake of the 2016 election, the ways they see themselves concerning their country are thrown into flux.
|
