After breaking the desi box office jinx earlier this summer, Kabir Khan’s 9/11 drama New York is setting records in the Middle East. It has already grossed $1.5 million (Rs 7 crore) in the UAE (Dubai, Bahrain and Oman): the biggest collections ever for a Hindi film. Now, it’s been selected as the opening film for the 33rd Cairo International Film Festival.

Says Khan, who will be present at the November 10 screening: “I would not miss it for anything. I’m keen to interact with the audience.”

Pirated copies of the film have been widely circulated in Syria, Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Says Khan, “The three protagonists of New York could quite easily be Jordanian students or Egyptian students. I’m not completely surprised by the reaction of the Arab world. In their day-to-day life and travelling, they perhaps suffer most the prejudices of the Western World.”

Cultural anthropologist Brian Larkin says that Indian movies hold out “a parallel, non-Western modernity”, which explains their huge appeal in Arabic, Indonesian, Senegalese and Nigerian culture. Film scholar Ira Bhaskar, author of Islamicate Cultures of Bombay Cinema says that it stands to sense that a movie like New York might have a different kind of legitimacy in the Middle East. It comes from a position that is “both near and far,” articulates both Muslim victimisation and the need for self-reflection through Irrfan Khan’s character, or even Katrina Kaif’s and Neil Nitin Mukesh’s.

New York, says Bhaskar, is both a departure from, and a continuation of what she calls the New Wave Muslim social, including movies like Naseem and Fiza. “Instead of nostalgia-drenched celebration, they explore what it means to be Muslim in these troubled times...New York naturally extends that theme into the global arena, given how in recent years, Bombay cinema has an unprecedented imaginative currency around the world,” she says.

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