‘The Bengali’ Review: New Orleans Author Searches for Her Indian Grandfather’s Past in Travelogue Doc

thewrap.com:

th century.Author and New Orleans native Fatima Shaik is the granddaughter of an immigrant Bengali merchant named Shaik Mohamed Musa who, as was not uncommon when Indian men uprooted to segregated America, married a local African-American woman and blended into a welcoming Black community.

Fatima never knew her grandfather — he died in 1919 before he could see his three children grow up — but she also grew up with little sense of her Indian heritage outside a treasured hookah of his that was lost in the Katrina flooding.Katrina’s devastation, which took loved ones of Fatima’s, spurred her to better understand a piece of her family tree that felt like an unfilled space, and in the documentary “The Bengali,” from Kolkata-born filmmaker Kavery Kaul, we’re with Fatima as she travels for the very first time to India to trace her grandfather’s existence, and hopefully to meet new relatives.

But the trip might also clarify family lore that nobody ever confirmed: in making a life for himself in New Orleans, did grandfather leave behind land he owned?What sounds like a heartfelt journey of discovery is, however, not as deeply affecting as one would wish.

It comes off as more of a wandering travelogue that only hints at richer insights into the bridging of cultures, preferring the comfort of an established trajectory to what seems, in bits and pieces, to have been an intriguingly uncertain quest.There’s also an untapped awkwardness to Kaul’s participation as director and companion, a role which obviously shifted from an attempt to capture her subject’s culture adjustment, in a semi-staged, semi-vérité-style, to actively helping her protagonist find Shaik’s home village of Khori and conducting interviews separately with the.