Divided We Fall: Americans in the Aftermath began in 2001 as a student project and flourished into an award-winning independent documentary film.

In 2001, Valarie Kaur, then a college student at Stanford University, received a grant to travel to India and research oral histories of the Partition of India in 1947 – the largest, swiftest migration in human history, marked by communal and religious violence. Valarie’s grandfather survived Partition, and his stories formed the beginning of her understanding of the intersections of religion, politics, and violence in history.

After the terrorist attacks on America in New York and Washington, D.C. on September 11, 2001, Valarie was instructed to postpone her trip abroad. In the hours and days that followed, stories of hate violence against anyone “Arab-looking” made their way to Valarie through emails and phone calls.

Then on September 15, 2001, Balbir Singh Sodhi, a turbaned Sikh man in Phoenix, Arizona was shot and killed in front of his gas station. Sodhi’s murder – the nation’s first hate-crime “retribution” killing – shook Valarie. She grew up as a third-generation Sikh American and her family friends knew Sodhi. In a country united in grief and resolve to stand against terrorism, Americans were targeting fellow Americans. How could both be the face of America – this unity and this violence?



She soon turned her grief into action. With her research grant, video camera, and 18 year-old turbaned cousin Sonny Gill, she set out across the country to record the stories that were not making the evening news. With questions, maps, and a reliable Honda Civic, Valarie and Sonny journeyed into the heart of a mourning nation, interviewing Sikhs, Muslims, Hindus, Christians, Jews and countless other Americans in her four months on the road. She traveled to New York, Washington, DC, Los Angeles, San Diego, Fresno, Phoenix, Sacramento, San Francisco, and places in between. She met gas station workers, scholars, professors, lawmakers, politicians, police officers, children, waiters, truck drivers, students, business owners – Americans from all walks of life. Her journey ended in Punjab, India where she met and interviewed the widow of Balbir Singh Sodhi.


She returned to Stanford in January 2002 with one hundred hours of interview footage. While at school, she continued to interview people in the Bay Area and elsewhere, as stories of hate-violence continued to unfold. In 2002, nearly six months after the murder of Balbir Singh Sodhi, his brother Sukhpal Sodhi was shot and killed in San Francisco in the taxi cab he drove for a living. Valarie returned to Phoenix to interview the Sodhi family who was once again shaken by violence.

Valarie wrote her senior honors thesis in religious studies, focusing on the stories of Sikh Americans, including her own analysis from disciplines of social psychology and the sociology of religion. Her thesis, “Targeting the Turban: Sikh Americans in the Aftermath of September 11” won the Golden Medal in the Humanities and became Valarie’s first written work on the experience of misrecognition in the aftermath of 9/11. Valarie went on to write and speak about these stories, presenting at over fifty conferences, film festivals, and community events around the country.

In October 2003, Valarie showed a 30-minute work-in-progress edited version of her footage at the Spinning Wheel Film Festival in Toronto. At the festival, Sharat Raju, a recent graduate of the American Film Institute, showed his award-winning narrative short film, American Made and was in the audience for Valarie’s presentation. The interviews and stories, raw and powerful, moved Sharat, and he offered to join the project.



In 2004, the two formed New Moon Productions and began work on making Divided We Fall: Americans in the Aftermath – a larger, ambitious documentary to explore what Valarie’s journey and the stories she discovered tell us about America, and who counts as “American.” At the same time, Valarie began graduate studies in ethics at Harvard Divinity School in fall 2004, and co-founded the Discrimination and National Security Initiative, an affiliate of Harvard’s Pluralism Project, in order to document ongoing patterns of discrimination in times of crisis. She determined that continued terrorist attacks and military action abroad were correlated with ongoing hate violence at home. In light of this, Sharat envisioned shooting additional interviews on film, a polished professional image, to contrast the raw immediacy of Valarie’s original hi-8 video footage.

In the summer of 2005, Panavision Camera awarded New Moon Productions with their New Filmmakers Grant – which provided a free film camera package. Eastman Kodak gave the production a sizable grant of 16mm film. Sharat brought his team from American Made on board for Divided We Fall – including cinematographer Matthew Blute, editor Scott Rosenblatt, and production manager Marcus Cano – to complete this second phase of production.

Valarie retraced her steps across the country, this time with the crew, returning to her original interviewees in New York, Washington, Los Angeles, San Francisco, including the Sodhi family in Phoenix. The production also interviewed experts – scholars, law professors, legislators – who place these untold stories of the aftermath into the larger context of American history, politics, and society.

The unique story about the making of Divided We Fall has been featured in news stories and magazine articles. In Spring 2006, National Public Radio broadcast segments from the film as part of the first radio series on Asian American history in Public Radio International’s “Crossing East.” Since the film’s premiere, interviews with Valarie Kaur have been broadcast on the BBC Asian Network, Minnesota Public Radio and local NPR stations in California. The Religion News Service, a national newswire service for coverage of religion and ethnics, ran a story on Divided We Fall in April 2007. Since 2005, Valarie has kept an online journal that chronicles her journey in making the film: valariekaur.blogpsot.com.

In September 2006, five years after it began as a student project, Divided We Fall: Americans in the Aftermath was completed as a professional independent film production. The world premiere of the film was hosted by the Sikh community of Phoenix, Arizona, on the eve of the fifth anniversary of Balbir Singh Sodhi’s death.