Watch: Trailer for Mira Nair’s ‘The Reluctant Fundamentalist’

IFC Films has debuted the first trailer for director Mira Nair’s (Monsoon Wedding) adaptation of Mohsin Hamid novel The Reluctant Fundamentalist. The movie centers on a successful Pakistani man (Riz Ahmed) whose life takes an unexpected turn for the worse after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. As his life soon begins to slip into a nightmare, he begins to hear the call of his own homeland.

Kiefer Sutherland, Kate Hudson and Liev Schrieber also star in this drama which certainly looks compelling enough, if only for the serious themes that the story touches on. I’m not quite sure what to make of Mira Nair who has been up-and-down over the years with excellent movies such as 2006′s The Namesake punctuating bombs such as Vanity Fair and most recently, Amelia.

Watch the trailer below (via Yahoo!). The Reluctant Fundamentalist opens on April 26th.

From Award-winning director Mira Nair, and based on the acclaimed novel by Mohsin Hamid, comes the explosive new film, The Reluctant Fundamentalist. In 2010, as student demonstrations rage in Lahore, a young Pakistani professor Changez Khan (Riz Ahmed) is interviewed by American journalist Bobby Lincoln (Liev Schreiber). Princeton-educated Changez tells Lincoln of his past as a brilliant business analyst on Wall Street. He talks of the glittering future that lay before him, his mentor, Jim Cross (Kiefer Sutherland), and the beautiful and sophisticated Erica (Kate Hudson), with whom he was set to share that future.
In the aftermath of 9/11, the alienation and suspicion he is suddenly met with leads him back to his homeland, and the family to whom he is very close. Charisma and intelligence catapult him to become a leader both in the eyes of the Pakistani students that adore him, and the American government that suspects him.
The collegial pretense of the meeting in a Lahore tea house, between Lincoln and Changez, slowly gives way to why the unlikely pair is meeting on a summer day—a foreign professor has been kidnapped by extremists, and the clock is ticking toward the deadline for his execution. Changez’s family is being harassed and is in real danger. Bobby listens carefully, but with an agenda of his own. Leading us through the culturally rich and beguiling worlds of New York, Lahore and Istanbul, The Reluctant Fundamentalist is an exploration of bias and the phenomenon of globalization that is both brilliant and unsettling.