American Made: three short films written and directed by South Asians explore what it means to be a South-Asian male in post-9/11 America.(CULTURE)

MAMEET NAYAK DESCRIBES THE TASK OF NAVIGATING THE WORLD outside his front door as walking a tightrope. "As a South Asian, you put up with some bullshit in this country, especially after those towers fell," he says. Mameet cannot go to his neighborhood basketball court without being harassed and called a "sand nigger." Once, he got chased down by a plainclothes policeman who, for no apparent reason, wanted to see his ID.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Mameet could be a real boy in Queens or Brooklyn, but he is, in fact, a creation of writers Tanuj Chopra and Hart Eddy in the film Punching at the Sun, one of a handful of films made since 9/11 that confront the changing reality for South Asians living in the United States.

Since the destruction of the World Trade Center, discrimination against those who appear to be South Asian, Arab or Muslim has been particularly high, says Faiza Ali, civil rights coordinator at the Council of American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in New York. Five years after the attack, she still receives thousands of complaints a year from Muslim New Yorkers, often of Arab or South-Asian descent, whose experiences with discrimination range from being held up at the Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) ...