Valarie Kaur Makes Film on the "Untold American Story"

February 17, 2006

Source: Clovis Independent

http://www.clovisindependent.com/news/story/11817784p-12533733c.html

On February 17, 2006 the Clovis Independent reported, "Valarie Kaur Brar, a Buchanan High School graduate, is producing a feature-length independent documentary about hate crimes after the 9-11 terrorist attacks... The film, 'Divided We Fall: Americans in the Aftermath,' will be released by New Moon Productions in early spring... After 9-11, when she was a junior at Stanford University studying religion and international relations, she watched as [certain] stories went unrecorded.

Brar's family, on a Sikh mailing list, received daily e-mails about name-callings, beatings and deaths.

A Sikh family friend was shot while he was planting flowers in front of his gas station in Arizona. [Brar] became worried that these stories of Muslim, Arab and Sikh Americans would go unrecorded... Instead of traveling to India for a class project, she grabbed a camera and took off across the United States with her 18-year-old cousin in a Honda Civic for four months... The 100 hours of footage caught the eye of an award-winning director at a Sikh film festival in Toronto... [Sharat Raju] approached Brar about turning the footage into a big-screen documentary... Brar accepted Raju's proposal, and they finished filming last summer."