Synopsis

Shakil belongs to the most suspect demographic in America – he is an angry, young Pakistani-American Muslim male. As many would fear, he wants to become a suicide bomber. He is connected with a local sleeper cell through his friend, Omar, but discovers that the “terror” cell isn’t exactly what he thinks it is. After accepting his “mission,” he explodes prematurely.

About the Film

Pornistan is truly an original - the world's first terrorist sex comedy. Dark subject matter is often filtered first through the genre of comedy (e.g. Chaplin's take on fascism in The Great Dictator or Kubrick's treatment of nuclear annihilation in Dr. Strangelove). There are certainly absurdly comic depths to be explored when dealing with the subjects of religious fanaticism and sexual repression. 

About the Campaign

Director's Statement

I look at the faces of Faisal Shahzad (the would be Times Square bomber) or Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (the notorious “Underwear Bomber”) and more recently of the Brothers Tsarnaev, and I see young men struggling with competing allegiances to twisted and misunderstood moral codes – the liberal permissiveness of the West  vs. the asceticism of the East. In one of his final articles before his death, Christopher Hitchens commented about Salman Rushdie’s 1983 novel, Shame, an “upsettingly brilliant psycho-profile of Pakistan,” that it “rightly laid emphasis on the crucial part played by sexual repression in the Islamic republic.” There is an irrefutable link between sexual repression and religious fanaticism. The same is true here in the United States. Rick Santorum avers that “America is suffering a pandemic of harm from pornography,” while expressions of Islamophobia serve as a clarion call for the Religious Right. The film operates in this background provoking an examination of Western/Christian and Eastern/Muslim stances on sex and violence – those two most instinctual human drives. Pornistan is a satirical terrorist sex comedy meant as an attack on fundamentalism as it is borne in the hearts of some impressionable and inexperienced young men.

-Asad Kirmani

www.pornistanthemovie.com