
Still from Building Babel, Sharif El-Gamal Photo credit: Gary He
Building Babel is an attempt to make sense of the sound and fury, justified or not, over Sharif El-Gamal’s quest to build a Muslim community center two blocks away from Ground Zero. The film, for its inherently public, political nature, is quite intimate in its focus on El-Gamal as a family man facing the world. Building Babel questions if one community can be more American than another.