From Award-winning director Mira Nair, and based on the acclaimed novel by Mohsin Hamid, comes the explosive new film, The Reluctant Fundamentalist. In 2010, as student demonstrations rage in Lahore, a young Pakistani professor Changez Khan (Riz Ahmed) is interviewed by American journalist Bobby Lincoln (Liev Schreiber). Princeton-educated Changez tells Lincoln of his past as a brilliant business analyst on Wall Street. He talks of the glittering future that lay before him, his mentor, Jim Cross (Kiefer Sutherland), and the beautiful and sophisticated Erica (Kate Hudson), with whom he was set to share that future.
In the aftermath of 9/11, the alienation and suspicion he is suddenly met with leads him back to his homeland, and the family to whom he is very close. Charisma and intelligence catapult him to become a leader both in the eyes of the Pakistani students that adore him, and the American government that suspects him.
The collegial pretense of the meeting in a Lahore tea house, between Lincoln and Changez, slowly gives way to why the unlikely pair is meeting on a summer day—a foreign professor has been kidnapped by extremists, and the clock is ticking toward the deadline for his execution. Changez’s family is being harassed and is in real danger. Bobby listens carefully, but with an agenda of his own. Leading us through the culturally rich and beguiling worlds of New York, Lahore and Istanbul, The Reluctant Fundamentalist is an exploration of bias and the phenomenon of globalization that is both brilliant and unsettling.
