Dastaar

Dastaar is a 10-minute short film set in New York City in September 2001, days after the September 11 attacks. The film opens on September 20, 2001, with an elderly Sikh man wearing a traditional turban walking down the street. Almost immediately he is attacked by a hooded assailant who shouts 'Hey Osama!' — a hate crime rooted in the post-9/11 conflation of Sikhs with Muslim extremists. The man is hospitalized as a result. His son, Harpreet, a young Americanized Sikh-American who speaks without an accent and does not wear a turban, drives into New York City to visit his injured father. He is accompanied by his white fiancée. During the drive and upon arriving in the city, Harpreet becomes acutely alert to the threats around him — cold stares, unspoken assumptions, and quiet scrutiny from passersby. His fiancée, however, notices none of this; she has no personal frame of reference for being perceived as dangerous or foreign, and struggles to understand why he is so tense and guarded. The film explores this perceptual gulf between the couple as a central tension: is Harpreet being paranoid, or prudent? The situation culminates when the pair narrowly avoid a potentially dangerous confrontation through a deliberate deception by Harpreet — a moment that finally makes his fiancée viscerally understand the very real threats he navigates daily as a visible minority in a climate of fear. The film uses the title 'Dastaar' — the Punjabi/Sikh word for turban — as both a literal object (the father's turban that made him a target) and a symbol of identity, dignity, and the burden of visibility.

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