Mira Nair's New Film Is Based On The Book "The Reluctant Fundamentalist"

Books that are made into films end up fascinating readers and film enthusiasts alike. For the readers, it is a matter of finding out whether the key characters live up to their own visualisation of the roles and the intrigue surrounding the casting of characters. For film-lovers, it gives a chance to go back to the book and relive the experience in words.

When it was revealed that Mira Nair would adapt Mohsin Hamid's bestselling 2007 novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist for the screen, the announcement carried extra weight: here was an Indian director taking on one of the defining post-9/11 novels — a Pakistani author's story of a Princeton-educated Pakistani man whose American dream curdles after the attacks.

Nair's film, shot in Lahore, Delhi, and Atlanta, stars Riz Ahmed as Changez, the young analyst torn between Wall Street ambition and home, with Kate Hudson, Liev Schreiber, Kiefer Sutherland, Shabana Azmi, and Om Puri in support. Nair expanded Hamid's intimate two-man conversation into a broader thriller, weaving in a CIA subplot that raised the stakes for the screen.

The film was chosen as the opening-night feature of the 69th Venice Film Festival in late August 2012 — a major honor, and a statement about the story's global resonance.

For readers of the novel, the casting of Changez was always going to be the litmus test. For everyone else, the film offered a rare thing: a mainstream thriller that asks the audience to see 9/11's aftermath through Pakistani eyes.