Director: Rashid Ghazi
Producers:  Ash-har Quraishi, Basma Babar-Quraishi

Description:
Fordson follows a high school football team from Dearborn, Michigan as it prepares for its rivalry game during the last ten days of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan. Fordson, a public school, boasts a 98% Arab-American population. The film unearths the story of a community desperately holding onto its Islamic faith while struggling to gain acceptance in post 9-11 America. Fordson is an unprecedented glimpse inside the lives of a community that is home to the largest concentration of Arabs in any city outside of the Middle East, and their determination to hold on to the American Dream.

Biography:
Rashid Ghazi founded North Shore Films to produce Fordson: Faith, Fasting and Football, a story which he began developing in 2003 with the basic belief that his fellow Americans were interested in what real-life American Muslims were really like. As a lifelong football fan, Ghazi felt the story of the Fordson High School football team could be the conduit for this kind of relatable, entertaining story––a place where everyday Arab-American Muslims share their homes, values, aspirations and opinions with other Americans. The award-winning film marks Ghazi’s directorial debut.

Ash-har Quraishi is an Emmy Award-winning television journalist, writer, photographer and filmmaker with more than a decade of international, investigative, long-form reporting and production experience. He is currently a correspondent for WTTW (PBS Chicago) where he reports for their flagship nightly news magazine show Chicago Tonight.

Basma Babar-Quraishi is an award-winning, long-form, documentary, and breaking news producer. For the last year and a half she has been working on Fordson in various capacities including producing, writing and coordinating production on the documentary. In early 2010 she cofounded Quraishi Productions, LLC with her producing partner and husband Ash-har Quraishi. Immediately following the events of September 11th, Babar-Quraishi became CNN’s first Islamabad Bureau Producer, responsible for news coverage of Pakistan across CNN networks.

Contact Information:
E-mail: rashid@fordsonthemovie.com
Web site: www.fordsonthemovie.com