He’s a nepo baby and he knows it.
New York City socialist mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani suggested that he only received a plush job on the 2016 Disney film Queen of Katwe because his mother was the director. Mamdani, 33, made the admission with a smile during an interview with the South African radio station Kaya FM 95.9 in October of that year. The aspiring mayor served on the flick as a music supervisor and “third assistant director,” according to IMDb. He was also given a cameo screen role.
“I actually created a playlist for Mira, who also happens to be my mother—you know, nepotism and hard work goes a long way,” Mamdani told Kaya FM interviewer Kgomotso Meso. Throughout the 11-minute interview, he speaks with an affected South African accent, at times adjusting his grammar to reflect the local patois. “Come watch this film, you get the sound proper,” he says at one point.
Though Mamdani lived in South Africa between 1996 and 1999—between the ages of five and seven years old—he has spent the majority of his life in the United States. He went to the Bronx High School of Science before graduating from Bowdoin College in Maine in 2014. Just months before Queen of Katwe hit theaters, Mamdani sat for an interview in which he reminisced about his Bronx Science days. He had no South African accent—but offered a revealing nugget of self-assessment.
“I know what someone wants to hear, right? I know what someone wants to hear to laugh. I know what someone wants to hear to feel whatever it might be,” Mamdani said. “In such an eagerness to make friends and be popular and whatever it might be, I would play to whatever X person needed from me as opposed to being who I actually wanted to be. It’s like being a great mirror, right, you know? You just give, you give people exactly what they want.”
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Mamdani, an avowed Democratic Socialist, was elected to the New York State Assembly in 2020. He represents the 36th district, an immigrant-heavy slice of Queens. The accent has not featured in his political career—and it surprised one prominent Big Apple progressive who has known Mamdani for years.
“I’ve known Zohran since he jumped into the New York City progressive movement in 2018 and I’ve never heard that accent,” the Mamdani ally told the Washington Free Beacon. “You get a lot of attention being a progressive firebrand in the New York media market, hopefully Zohran isn’t just playing to the cameras as a personality.”
Mamdani is now running for New York City mayor and has rocketed to second place in the Democratic primary, behind only disgraced former governor Andrew Cuomo. He’s promised an unashamed Marxist platform of rent freezes, free public transportation, free child care, public grocery stores, a $30 minimum wage, and more.
Those progressive values, however, weren’t always present in the making of Queen of Katwe, which is based on the true story of Ugandan chess prodigy Phiona Mutesi and her struggles growing up in the Ugandan slum of Katwe, outside the capital city of Kampala.
Mamdani’s mother, Indian-American filmmaker Mira Nair, directed the flick, which was a commercial flop, grossing just $10.3 million of its $15 million budget, according to Box Office Mojo. While there appeared to be money in that budget for Nair and her son, there was none for Mutesi, who did not receive a dime from the film, WBUR reported in 2019.
The film was adapted from a book of the same name by Tim Crothers and was a coproduction of Disney and ESPN Films. While promoting it in 2016, Nair pointed to Mutesi’s “inspiring” and “remarkable” story, which she contrasted with the “paucity of films that we ever see about this African continent.”
“It is always someone else’s story, or it’s a story of despair, or of violence, or dictatorship, or bestiality,” she said. “And the story of Phiona Mutesi is a remarkable one.”
Mamdani, who did not respond to a request for comment, has supported defunding the police and is one of the most notorious Israel-haters in New York State. He backs the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against the Jewish state and campaigned this week with Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D., Mich.), one of Israel’s most vocal opponents in the House of Representatives.
Mamdani’s father, Mahmood Mamdani, is a professor at Columbia University. He has long been sharply critical of Israel and “specializes in the study of colonialism, anti-colonialism and decolonisation,” according to his faculty biography.
Original News Source – Washington Free Beacon
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