'Astoria Park' is like post 9/11 Spike Lee

Astoria Park, built around basketball, raises questions about racial tensions post-9/11  

NEW YORK: Gifted young film makers Chrysovalantis Stamelos and Paras Chaudhari are winning rave reviews for their high-tension urban drama Astoria Park, set on a basket ball court in New York’s immigrant quarters after the September 11 terrorist attacks.

The film won an award for outstanding cast performance at the “Action on Film Festival” in Los Angeles and drew a large audience at the GOPIO Mini-Indian Film Festival in Connecticut. Built around basketball and freestyle rap, Astoria Park shows an explosive confrontation between two neighbourhood “crews” in the immigrant quarters of Astoria in Queens as they struggle to protect their identity and territory. 

“Both the groups that clash are very diverse ethnically but my eight-member group in the film is predominantly South Asian with three other members who are not,” co-director Chaudhari, 26, who also plays the lead role of Aman, told DNA.

“In the film, the antagonists hit on my girlfriend, but that is not the reason for the tension. There are a lot of other things that add up like the post-9/11 conflict scenario, homophobia and territorial dominance.

The antagonists don’t like the fact that their neighbourhood is being taken over by South Asians. But its blind hate — sort of fuelled by images people carry around after seeing stuff on television,” said Chaudhari, adding that Astoria Park was not addressing 9/11 so much as using it as a backdrop for telling their story.

One critic quipped that director Stamelos deftly created Astoria Park as a post-9/11 update of Spike Lee’s 1989 film Do the Right Thing with Indians playing basketball and encountering racial conflict.

“In Astoria Park audiences see South Asians in a way they have never seen them before — growing up in a rough neighbourhood in Astoria; fighting over turf on a basketball court and the main influence is hip-hop,” said Chaudhari, who has composed the hip-hop for the film and “dukes it out” with his challenger by rapping on a Middle Eastern drum. 

Astoria Park does not have a scripted end. The filmmakers wanted to keep it that way as there are no easy answers to racial conflict in New York’s immigrant quarters. “As filmmakers our goal is to ask questions, not answer them,” said Chaudhari. 

Stamelos and Chaudhari are planning a festival run for Astoria Park and their second short film Aris & the Art of Parkour Bhangra-Fu through the rest of the year. Their second film is a martial arts movie with Matrix-like fight sequences cut to bhangra music.

Stamelos explained; “I have always been a fan of Hong Kong cinema. I love the style of Hong Kong fight sequences which are so fast-paced — they are like dance. I see martial art scenes played to rap music, or traditional Asian music, I find it boring. When I hear bhangra tracks — I can imagine without even trying a fight sequence.”