Monday, January 14, 2019

Cinema Libre's Jihadists Heads To DVD On Apr. 2


DVD & Blu-ray Release Report, Ralph Tribbey
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.   

DVD & Blu-ray Release Report, Ralph Tribbey
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.

DVD & Blu-ray Release Report, Ralph Tribbey


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