Ramadan in Quarantine
2020 · 6m · USA
Genres: documentary, family
Tones: contemplative, tender
Brooklyn mother of six Sherihan Moustafa and her family navigate the first Ramadan ever observed in isolation — no mosque, no gatherings, no traditional Eid.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
It's a portrait of faith under constraint, sure, but the premise does the heavy lifting—the actual filmmaking stays dutiful and observational when it could've gotten weird with the isolation angle, and that feels like a missed chance to interrogate what Ramadan *becomes* when stripped of its communal scaffolding.
A modest but formally aware documentary that honors the rhythms of domestic ritual and spiritual practice; the restraint in not over-scoring or over-explaining the family's adaptation shows real curatorial confidence in the audience's capacity to sit with quietness.
The decision to let the family's own video calls and phone recordings become the connective tissue between isolation and faith—rather than imposing a omniscient narrator—is what makes this feel less like pandemic content and more like an intimate act of witnessing.