Rhode Island International Film Festival 2009

Team Taliban is a film about America as much as it is a film about wrestling. Adeel Alam grew up watching pro-wrestling on television. It did not take him long to decide that watching wrestling wasn't enough. When Adeel was eight years old he was doing flips on the living room couch, and by the time he was sixteen he enrolled in wrestling school. Before graduating college he was wrestling in independent promotions throughout the Midwest. When asked what it is about professional wrestling that captivates him so intensely, Adeel cites the allure of the spotlight. Whether it is the cheers that fall upon the hero of the match (the face) or the boos directed towards the villain (the heel), Adeel is drawn to the larger than life hyperbole that is professional wrestling. Recently, that sense of exaggeration took a more personal turn when Adeel shed his old character, a masked high-flying wrestler who didn't talk, for the controversial character of a terrorist, "Mustafa Ali". Wrestling as half of the "Team Taliban" duo, Adeel discovered his character's charged political nature incited immediate and passionate reactions from the crowd--the goal of any successful pro-wrestler. However, as a Muslim-American himself, Adeel has to contend with the images and stereotypes his character enacts. He certainly gets the audience's attention, but is the image he is placing in the spotlight the one he thinks the world should see? Going beyond the question of whether Adeel's portrayal is "right" or "wrong," Team Taliban ponders the infinitely more complicated effects of such a performance. The distance between obvious caricatures that reflect a culture's preconceived stereotypes and that stereotype itself is a line that can shift quickly and without warning. Team Taliban asks how the four corners of a wrestling ring can change the way we view The War on Terror.