General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

The Infidel

The Infidel is a 2010 British comedy directed by Josh Appignanesi and written by David Baddiel, in which an East London Muslim family man, Mahmud Nasir, discovers after his mother's death that he was adopted and that his birth parents were Jewish.¹^•² The film stars the Iranian-born British comedian Omid Djalili as Mahmud, with Richard Schiff, Archie Panjabi, Igal Naor, and Amit Shah in supporting roles.¹^•³ It premiered internationally at the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival and opened in the United Kingdom on 9 April 2010.²^•⁴

Key fact	Detail
Director / writer	Josh Appignanesi (director); David Baddiel (screenwriter)¹
Runtime and format	105 minutes, UK, English; a 100-minute version was classified MA 15+ in Australia¹^•⁵
Lead cast	Omid Djalili (Mahmud Nasir), Richard Schiff (Lenny), Archie Panjabi, Igal Naor, Amit Shah¹^•³
Key crew	Composer Erran Baron Cohen; cinematographer Natasha Braier; editor Kim Gaster²
Production	Filmed in London, England, May to June 2009; production companies included Slingshot Productions, Ombadsman, and The Salt Company International⁶^•⁷
Release	International premiere at Tribeca 2010; UK release 9 April 2010²^•⁴
Reception	59% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer from 27 reviews; 46% Popcornmeter from 5,000+ ratings; worldwide gross $2,817,080⁸^•⁷

Spoilers

Plot and premise

Mahmud Nasir is a settled, non-practicing Muslim family man in London's East End, described by MetFilm as a successful business owner and by the Guardian as a Muslim minicab driver with a placidly contented home life.¹^•⁹ His life is unsettled by two events at once: the recent death of his mother, and the engagement of his son to the stepdaughter of a notorious radical cleric from Pakistan, whose approval the marriage requires.⁹^•¹⁰

While clearing out his mother's belongings, Mahmud finds his birth certificate and learns that he was adopted, that his birth parents were Jewish, and that his given name was Solly Shimshillewitz.²^•⁹ To reconnect with his biological father, he has to become "more Jewish," and the only person he can turn to is Lenny (Richard Schiff), a depressed, borderline-alcoholic Jewish American cabbie who lives across the street.²^•⁹ Lenny's tutorials are less about Judaism as a faith than about mannerisms: how to say "oy" and how to respond to the music of Fiddler on the Roof.⁹ Mahmud's double life comes to a head when he is discovered secretly wearing a yarmulke at a Free Palestine meeting.⁹

Production

The film was shot in London between May and June 2009.⁶ It was produced by Arvind Ethan David, Uzma Hasan, Stewart Le Maréchal, and David Baddiel, with Slingshot as the production company and The Salt Company International as sales agent.²^•⁵ The Muslim stand-up comedian Shazia Mirza is credited as script consultant.¹¹

Appignanesi's previous feature, Song of Songs (2006), was a serious study of transgression, identity, and faith in the Orthodox Jewish community of north London; the Guardian's Peter Bradshaw described The Infidel as a shift to something more confrontational and taboo-busting.⁹

Themes and intent

Baddiel's stated aim was to make Mahmud an Islamic everyman, a slightly sloppy, slightly inept figure who falls asleep during prayer and is obsessed with football and New Romantic music, rather than a religious extremist.¹² In a Guardian interview he said the idea came partly out of his own ethnic ambiguity, having been bullied both for being Pakistani and for being Jewish, and that the film deliberately places a normal, likable but flawed British Muslim family at its center, not defined only by religion.¹³ He added that the film had been shown to groups of devout Muslims with positive responses, and that it had been sold to 62 countries, with Israel the only one that had not taken it.¹³

Critics read the film as a comedy of identity rather than a satire of doctrine. The Tribeca program notes described it as building up modern Muslim and Jewish stereotypes and then breaking them down with humor and wit.² A Glasgow PhD thesis on comedy noted that the film's humor works affiliatively, drawing an in-group of both Jews and Muslims, and that its sympathetic portrayal of Jewishness situates "authentic" Jewishness against paper-official Judaism.¹⁴ A scholarly chapter on Jewish-Muslim relations in film places The Infidel among a small group of English-language films of the early 2000s, alongside Arranged (2007) and David (2011), that portray Jewish-Muslim alliance on screen and challenge the centrality of the Israel/Palestine conflict to that relationship.¹⁵ An academic analysis in Angles similarly lists the film among British screen works that resist defining Muslim identities solely by religion.¹⁶

Release and reception

The film had its international premiere in the Discovery section of the 2010 Tribeca Film Festival.² It opened in the UK on 9 April 2010, rated 15, with a 105-minute running time.⁴ The Australian Classification Board classified a 100-minute version MA 15+ for strong coarse language on 31 March 2010.⁵ IMDb records a UK video version in which Mahmud's road-rage scene was sound-dubbed to soften the strongest profanity.⁷

Critical response was mixed. On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds a 59% Tomatometer from 27 reviews and a 46% Popcornmeter score from more than 5,000 ratings.⁸ Time Out gave it three of five stars, calling Baddiel's script "sharp, wise and very funny" but judging that the film drifts from boundary-pushing comedy into a sentimental life lesson as an underdeveloped subplot about Mahmud's son's marriage takes over.⁴ Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian praised Djalili's "great big expressive, rubbery face" and his double act with Schiff, whose comic timing he called a revelation to viewers who knew him only from The West Wing.⁹ The Los Angeles Times's Robert Abele called it "an admirably cagey effort to mine humor from the thorny cultural and racial divide that is Muslim-Jewish relations," while finding the resolution lazily tidy.¹⁷ Screen's Mark Adams credited Djalili's "exuberant and engaging performance" and the film's willingness to poke fun at all religions, though he noted the comedy momentum slows as a tolerance message is leveraged into the final scenes.¹⁸ The Irish Times judged it "so warmly inclusive that you'd feel like a real nebbish for disliking it."¹⁹

Djalili received a nomination for the Peter Sellers Award for Comedy at the 2010 Evening Standard Awards.¹ The film grossed $2,817,080 worldwide according to IMDb.⁷

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Comedy and romantic films (individual works) › Comedies of 2009 to 2010 › Released in 2010

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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