Into the den of the lion
— or the beast as the case might be — went documentary filmmakers François
Margolin and Lemine Ould Salem … and lived to tell about. How do we know this? Because the pair returned with the footage
to prove it, which was assembled into the feature-length documentary titled Jihadists.
In France their film was
censored — given a rating that dramatically limited its theatrical release and
banned it from being broadcast on television.
It nevertheless played at one theatrical venue for an entire year.
Why? On Apr. 2, thanks to the efforts of Cinema
Libre, domestic audiences will have the opportunity to discover what the
censoring was all about (which, in retrospect, was a complete misunderstanding
of the film). That is the street date
for Jihadists
on DVD.
In the topsy-turvy world
of Jihadism, the fundamentals of Islam have been pretzel’d into an insanity
that rivals that of Alice and her adventures in Wonderland. The pair traveled to the fabled city of Timbuktu
in Mali and eventually worked their way to Mauritania, Tunisia, Iraq and Syria,
where they gained access to radical proponents of the Salafi movement, who
rambled to the camera as if preaching their gospel to the multitudes.
All it took was for one of
their subject to have a bad day and be of ill-temper and François Margolin and Lemine
Ould Salem would have never been seen or heard from again.
Once the words and ideas
were captured on film, the pair assembled the film with examples and propaganda
videos to paint a picture that — to Western eyes — is what might come of
interviews with asylum inmates. Jihadists
is a documentary that could easily be a seen as a nightmare, but what is on the
screen is all too real.
Jihadists is presented in French with English subtitles …
Cinema Libre’s “U.S. version” includes contextualized narration from the
filmmakers.
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