CITIZEN KHAN

TYPE: Documentary Short
GENRE: Documentary
STATUS: Production

LOGLINE

A hardworking small town Wyoming Muslim mother of 6 grown children prepares to leave the place where her Afghan/Pakistani immigrant father created a small business empire: what does the Khan family’s American dream mean now that she prepares to leave it all behind?

SYNOPSIS

Rolling country, big skies. On the Bighorn National Forest border in Sheridan, Wyoming, ZARINA KHAN warmly welcomes guests to her 20-room motel. Quranic verses glimmer on the reception room walls. The lobby is cluttered with knick knacks accumulated over the years. On the wall a portrait with a piercing gaze presides over her: Zarina’s legendary father, Zarif Khan. Over 100 years ago, Zarif journeyed to Sheridan from a tiny village in present day Pakistan (“From one Wild West to another!” Zarina jokes). A big western sunset strikes the window. 

He never learned to read or write English, acquiring his trade from a German-born tamale vendor at a hole in the wall called Louie’s. After that vendor retired, Zarif took over, keeping the name. Working 80 hour weeks, he built a thriving restaurant business. While other towns in Wyoming have taken on a xenophobic bent, Sheridan is different. Older locals openly share stories about Zarif Khan’s famous burgers. In 2018 the town honored the man who was lovingly known as “Hot Tamale Louie” with a statue. It was ceremoniously unveiled at an arts festival at the site of his old shop downtown.

Still tirelessly working at 66, having created a small fortune in stocks and a business empire in Sheridan, Zarif Khan travelled back to Pakistan for the first time since 1907 and finally got married. He returned to Sheridan with his new wife and fathered 6 children, including Zarina. Following each birth the whole family would fly back to Pakistan to introduce the new baby to relatives.

On what would be his last trip home, Zarif was stabbed to death by a nephew. “He never came home,” Zarina remembers through tears. “My mom just told me one day, dad’s not coming back. My dream is to do something in his honor, but I never have…” She trails off.

July is Sheridan’s rodeo month and five of Zarina’s six adult children––who now run their own successful gym business far away in Houston––are home on a nostalgic, bittersweet visit. This will be the last time they are together as a family in the town where they grew up. They clean their mother’s motel as they used to during their childhoods. They work out every morning together, with insane energy. Their tears flow at the rodeo’s opening national anthem. At night they grill outside, clean, help their mother: just like the old days. Zarina’s youngest son Bhadshah meets an older Crow Man who recalls how Louie’s was the only place Native Americans could dine. As Zarina packs up, she pulls out old newspaper clippings about her family and tears up as she reads out loud. She’s planning to sell the motel and leave Sheridan to be closer to the kids in Houston. The end is coming for the Khans in Sheridan and no one can quite believe it. 

The five Khan grandchildren lay flowers at the feet of Zarif’s statue with Zarina. She talks to the statue of the father she never really had a chance to know, as usual. After her children leave for Houston, Zarina is once again alone, reflecting on the meaning of this legacy. The Khans epitomize immigrant success. The whole town knows them. After losing her father at such a young age, Zarina’s destiny has been to continue honoring and fulfilling his entrepreneurial vision, imparting it to her children. She struggles to find a way to honor all that he created as she faces the strain of leaving everything she's ever known behind. She is facing the biggest identity change of her life and with it comes deep reflection.

Over the years, Zarina and her kids adapted to their local community in every way, but on the 20th anniversary of 9/11, they can all recall how the climate shifted that sunny September morning, especially in encounters with guests from out of town. Interweaving her father’s legacy and hard won belonging in Sheridan as Zarina packs up her motel, CITIZEN KHAN is the true story of the forgotten places that are built on the backs of those not deemed “citizen” enough. 

In her motel grounds, Zarina sits alone by the poolside, her solitariness accentuated against the vast sky. “I’ve already found a buyer,” she shares. But she feels torn. Should she be leaving behind all that her father worked so hard to achieve? What happens when she can no longer rely on her family’s deep local roots and instead has to establish a new path on her own? Who will she be once she’s no longer running a respected Sheridan small business, an intricate part of the local landscape?

Set against a moment of heightened violence in the U.S. toward immigrants, especially Muslim and South Asian Americans – CITIZEN KHAN reminds that families like the Khans have been critical to the success of American towns from frontier times to the present. It also serves to reframe battles––ideological, projected and real–– for citizenship and challenges to Eurocentric definitions of what it is to be an American that actively continue to shape current attitudes. And it tells the untold story of a second generation American woman, forging a new life amidst a major turning point that calls into question her entire identity and sense of purpose and belonging.

ARTISTIC STATEMENT

Khaula: Coming to the US as a young child, growing up in a predominantly white community. I quickly learned to code switch to fit in, changing my name’s pronunciation from “Khaula” to “Cola”, speaking English in public settings to my parents rather than Urdu. For me, Zarif Khan’s Americanized “Louie” nickname exemplifies one of these painful choices immigrants like me and my family have to make while deciding whether to embrace or reject our heritage.

Sana: My desire to tell stories about immigrants in remote communities stems from my own personal experience of immigrating to a remote island in Canada at a young age. We were one of very few Muslim families who had landed in this obscure place, among 6th or 7th generation Irish and Scottish descendants. I remember fighting to have my family history heard or relevant as we celebrated Ceilidhs and line dancing. My default became minimizing my own story, as immigrant stories generally faded. 

We both want to visibilize immigrant contributions and legacy, especially as we contend with a decades long anti-immigrant fervour in communities hardened by economic and social ills. 

For us this is a rare chance to tell a version of the American dream through an immigrant lens that is not marred by the white or male gaze. As women, the story resonates because––while on the surface it appears to be about a man who risked everything to settle in the American West––we focus on a woman inheriting this legacy and her complex (yet little discussed in public discourse) highly gendered isolation and sacrifices. We examine the drive that so many immigrant women feel to bravely persist and keep going—not as an “assistant” of that dream, as in for example DONUT KING––but front and center.

As Pakistani Muslim women who immigrated to and grew up in North America, we have few film role models that mirror our unique experiences. Whenever our communities are shown, male perspective and gaze dominates. Even when spotlighting subjugation and oppression, these stories often fail to challenge contemporary representations, watering down and Americanizing a diverse Muslim identity and population. We want to expand these representational limits and push the boundaries of what a “Muslim” story can be.

KEY CREW

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