(WISCONSIN) – A marketing executive in the greater Chicago area got a call from a friend about a high school football team in Dearborn, Michigan, that had won a spot in the state semi-final football championship.
“The amazing thing about this team,” Rashid Ghazi, a partner at Paragon Marketing Group, said at TEDx Traverse City 2012, “is they fast from sunrise to sunset – no food or drink.”
The team, the Fordson High School Tractors, played for a public American high school founded by Henry Ford, where the student body was 98% Arab American Muslim. It occurred to Ghazi that the Tractors’ story might be the perfect vehicle for changing Islam’s image in America. Although it took seven years, Ghazi, a Muslim American of Indian descent, went on to direct and produce an award-winning documentary about the team.
Milwaukee Muslim Film Festival will feature Ghazi’s 2011 documentary FORDSON: Faith, Fasting, Football at 7 p.m. Saturday, April 10, and Ghazi speak at the talkback.
An all-American sports story, Ghazi’s film follows the team of Muslim athletes from a working-class Detroit suburb as they practice for the big game during the last ten days of Ramadan. The movie reveals a community holding onto its Islamic faith and structuring its identity in post-9/11 America. It shows how this group of Arab Americans integrated football into their way of life, their culture and their ethnicity.
Register for the free screening and talkback with the film director. Or view the talkback with Ghazi on the MMFF’s Facebook and YouTube pages at 8:40 p.m.