After the election of Trump, I was devastated. Like so many of my peers, I was shocked and virtually paralyzed.

A few days later I was invited by a friend to a Muslim-Jewish discussion-circle. There, we shared our feelings in small groups– our fears and outrage.  Then a Muslim-American woman, Debbie Almontaser, rose and spoke about what was happening in her community. How anti-Muslim targeting had increased greatly, and reports of violence and hate speech against Muslims were clearly on the rise. At that moment I recognized that my Muslim neighbors were on the absolute front line in this new era of sanctioned bigotry. And at the same time, I was stunned to acknowledge that despite living in New York City my whole life, I didn’t really know any Muslim Americans.

Then and there I realized I had to get out of my homogenous Manhattan neighborhood and go meet my neighbors. I headed to areas of Queens and Brooklyn where I knew there were strong Muslim communities—I just wanted to make a connection and maybe offer to make short online videos, or perhaps produce an advocacy film for a non-profit. I wasn’t really thinking about making another feature-length documentary – I just wanted to get to know Muslim communities better and contribute in some way.

On previous documentaries I’ve always worked with terrific cinematographers, but I decided it’d be best to keep things as lean as possible. So I got together a camera set-up and started going out to see what I could do. After meeting many individuals and visiting numerous mosques I did my first shoot in January, 2017, the day after the inauguration. I rode along on a chartered bus to Washington for the Women’s March with a group of Afghan women, most of whom had never participated in any kind of political action before. A week after that, the first executive order of the Muslim ban was issued, and protests exploded across the city.

At that point I felt it was truly urgent to capture what was happening in a documentary—my path was clearly laid out for me. For the next year and a half, I followed the trajectory and pushback against the Muslim ban. At the same time, I became increasingly engaged in the lives and stories of Shamsi, Debbie, Mohamed, Aber and Kobir. I continued filming until the Supreme Court decision about the ban in June, 2018.

The result of that 18 months is AMERICAN MUSLIM.