Hamas-backing Qatar has bankrolled film and stage projects by socialist Zohran Mamdani’s Israel-bashing movie-director mom — and one of its royals is now pushing her son’s mayoral bid, The Post has found.
Sheikha Al-Mayassa bint Hamad Al-Thani, sister to the ruling emir, and the state-funded cultural institutions she controls, have supported Mira Nair and her creative projects since at least 2009, even extending a personal invitation to participate in the cultural program the country organized as part of the festivities around hosting the 2022 World Cup.
Since mid-June, Sheikha Al-Thani has taken to promoting Mamdani’s mayoral candidacy on social media, boosting news of favorable polling on Instagram and posting fire emojis under a TikTok video of him embracing Nair.
“They are buying somebody who is willing to be bought and at the time of their choosing they will ask for what they want,” warned Danielle Pletka, a foreign policy expert at the American Enterprise Institute think tank, of Nair’s Qatar ties. “They need a rainbow coalition of people who will support the ideology they promote: sometimes it will be Islamism, sometimes it will be antisemitism, sometimes it will be anti-Israel.”
The Post found extensive ties between the Queens assemblyman’s mom and the Qatari elite, including:
- In 2009 her film ‘Amelia’ opened the first-ever Doha Tribeca Film Festival in the Gulf regime’s capital.
- From 2010 until 2014, the Doha Film Institute — founded by Sheikha Al-Thani — underwrote a “bootcamp” to train Qatari students in screenwriting and filmmaking at Nair’s Maisha Film Labs in East Africa and in Doha, according to both organizations’ websites.
- The Doha Film Institute also paid the entire $15 million budget of Nair’s 2012 film “The Reluctant Fundamentalist,” one of the first movies it produced. The flick, which had previously struggled to obtain financing, tells the story of a Pakistani immigrant who suffers mistreatment at the hands of U.S. authorities after 9/11, and opened the Doha Tribeca Film Festival that year.
- Nair’s film “Nafas,” about historic Qatari pearl divers, was the first movie commissioned by the Qatar National Museum, which Sheikha Al-Thani chairs. It premiered at the museum’s 2019 opening, which Nair attended, and remains one of its flagship exhibits. Its budget has not been made public.
- A company Nair set up in her native India did $102,000 in business in 2022 and 2023 with event management firm Agence Publics Qatar, which shares its chairman with the Qatar Engineering & Construction Co., a major player in Qatar’s piggy-bank oil and gas industry, according to LinkedIn and publicly-listed import records collected by private supply chain-monitoring firms.
- The country’s most high-profile support for the auteur came in 2022, when state-owned Qatar Airways and Qatar Creates — another of the sheikha’s pet projects boosting the country as a cultural destination — produced an extravagant Nair-directed stage adaptation of her Golden Globe-nominated film “Monsoon Wedding” as part of the World Cup festivities.
Qatar’s sharia-inspired social policies, which bar women from marrying or holding government roles without a male guardian’s permission and which can punish homosexuality with torture or even death, are at odds with the progressive images Nair and Mamdani have cultivated.
The filmmaker has presented herself a voice for the “marginalized,” while her son has pledged to make New York an “LGBTQIA+ sanctuary city.”
Thousands of migrant workers died building facilities for the World Cup in Qatar’s 125-degree temperatures amid conditions human rights activists described as “modern day slavery.”
But in an interview with the website Qatar Happening during the soccer tournament and the ‘Monsoon Wedding’ musical’s run, Nair had only praise for the regime and her royal patron.
“Her Highness Sheikha Al Mayassa bint Hamad Al-Thani has loved the movie but also supported the inception of this musical over several years,” Nair said.
Nair has boycotted the Haifa International Film Festival over Israeli policies she says “privilege one religion over another.” But Qatar bans non-Muslims from practicing in public, and the State Department has warned the country is “pursuing a number of actions which will ultimately lead to the eradication” of its Bah’aii religious minority.
Despite these well-documented abuses, as recently as November 2024, Nair was photographed attending a high-profile exhibit opening at the Qatar National Museum. There is no record of her ever speaking out on the regime’s notoriously deplorable human rights record.
The filmmaker did not respond to repeated requests for comment, nor did the Qatari entities that have financed her work.
Critics have called Qatar “America’s ultimate ‘frenemy,’” as it provides support to anti-U.S. Islamist organizations while simultaneously hosting an American airbase. Jonathan Schanzer, executive director of the nonprofit Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, called it “both arsonist and firefighter”: backing destabilizing organizations like Hamas and the Taliban, then offering itself as a mediator with the groups on behalf of the West.
Schanzer said it was concerning only “one degree of separation” could exist between the country’s ruling elite the mayor of America’s biggest city, given how the Qataris have used their country’s vast wealth to bribe ex-New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez and figures in the European Parliament.
“The Qataris are hyperactive in terms of international diplomacy, international investment, and everything that they do is designed to spread their funds and spread their influence,” he warned.
There is no publicly available evidence of a direct relationship between Mamdani and the Qatari regime. The assemblyman maintained he had never traveled to Qatar, nor received direct financial assistance from the country’s institutions.
But his campaign declined to answer whether he had received such assistance from his mother, or whether he had had contact with the sheikha, and would not directly condemn the Al-Thani family’s rule—only attesting to “his belief in universal human rights and the freedom to advocate for justice everywhere.”
“The attempt to weaponize his mother’s career against him is an insult to voters who care about actual issues, not manufactured distractions,” said campaign spokeswoman Dora Pekec.
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