Jihad Rehab: A Tale of Cancellation with Meg Smaker

[Music] hey everyone thanks for checking out the show my podcasts all have ads if you find the ads annoying then consider subscribing to the podcast with a subscription you won't hear any ads plus you'll have access to exclusive content only available to subscribers if you can't afford a subscription please write to me at admin Coleman hughes.org with a few words explaining why you enjoy the channel and how it benefits you we'll get back to you after a short period of consideration and will offer a subscription free of charge thanks again for watching and for all your support welcome to the first conversations with Coleman of 2023 if you're watching on YouTube you'll notice in a moment that I'm using a new studio where I can actually get guests in person and we're starting things off right with a great guest Meg smaker if you've heard of Meg it's probably because of the controversy surrounding her new documentary originally called Jihad rehab but later changed to the unredacted I actually like the original title better for what it's worth now before I describe the controversy to you I want to First say that this is one of the best documentaries I have ever seen in my life hands down and it was initially received that way at the Sundance Film Festival Meg and her camera crew follow former jihadists who have just been released from Guantanamo Bay after 15 years these former terrorists go through a special rehab program in Saudi Arabia and eventually try to integrate back into Saudi Society with varying levels of success the doc touches on America's war on terror the root causes of jihadist violence the challenges of becoming a civilian again once you've spent years fighting and in prison and our tendency to dehumanize people who've done terrible things as I said to Megan our conversation if you had told me that her documentary pissed some people off and you asked me to guess who I would have guessed that it was neocons and Bush era conservatives who might dislike the fact that her film humanizes former terrorists that's what I would have predicted anyway but everything is upside down nowadays so it should come as no surprise that Meg's film was instead condemned not by the right but by a small group of perpetually offended people on the far left they condemned the film for being islamophobic which it certainly isn't and they condemn Meg for being a white woman making a film about Arabs never mind that she lived in the Middle East for many years speaks Arabic and so forth if this documentary had been created by an Arab filmmaker but was identical in every other way I have no doubt that these same people would be saying it should be nominated for an Oscar it's really that good unfortunately after her initially warm reception at Sundance the people at Sundance reversed course and ejected her film from the festival caving in to the demands of a small group of activists truly a cowardly concession to cancel culture in my view I don't know the status of the doc right now but if you are able to see it you really should so without further Ado my conversation with Meg smaker okay Mex maker thank you so much for uh coming on my show yeah thanks for having me it's been a whirlwind three days in New York and uh I'm not from here so I'm glad it worked out well I'm glad you're capping it off with a conversation with me I'm excited to get you on I've wanted to get you on for a while and before we get into your excellent documentary which is either called Jihad rehab or the unredacted and we'll get to that I want to know a little bit about you uh first of all where did you grow up and did you grow up as a teen and young adult with a conscious interest in film no um I was born in Bay Area in Oakland and I grew up I was five my parents moved from there to about 45 minutes east of Oakland to this really small town um and so I grew up in the East Bay and in Northern California and you know family was you know middle class working class and just typically a very kind of my dad was a firefighter and I never really got into film at all I didn't get to film until later in life but I was always interested in stories um like I have a learning disability and when I was younger I started reading a lot later and I couldn't really read so I would just look at pictures and just make up stories for the pictures are you dyslexic uh a plethora of things uh dyslexic but also have a tracking problem so a lot of the times when I read stuff um this is why if you ever get a email from me and there's a [ __ ] ton of typos that is why I can't I can't edit or see uh mistakes and stuff so I just have to have someone read over read over things so yeah not a not great when you're writing papers for University interesting you're the third intelligent successful person I've had on my podcast that had a learning disability as a child one was Scott Barry Kaufman who's now a psychology professor at Barnard in Columbia who was diagnosed learning disabled as a kid and wrote a whole book about it I believe another was Ezra Klein who had a learning disability as a kid and now has gone on to be a very successful you know writer and and so it's all always interesting to me to meet people that were that struggle with that or were categorized that way as a kid and then ended up being very successful precisely in the kinds of domains which you think would be hampered by such a problem I used to hate the fact when I was definitely younger having it because you know what would take you an hour to read it takes me four and so um a really funny story uh it was finals week and you have all these papers and exams that you have to do and I had this class that was on um the Vietnam War and the history of the Vietnam War and it was taught by this old army ranger about like a curmudgeon to to in every in every step like a old spicy curmudgeon and uh it was like 2 A.M and I was you know to finish up the paper first class because it was due the next day and you remember this change all button in spell check yeah it's 2 A.M and I was you know to give it a quick run through and so I just hit change all change I'll change I'll change I'll change I'll print fair enough so about a couple days later I handed in the next day and a couple days later he hands back everyone's paper except for mine and he goes you kids every year you turn the same [ __ ] regurgitated [ __ ] but this year one paper stood out this year as soon as I read the title and the first paragraph I knew it was going to be different and I'm in the back road being like that's my paper I'm awesome and then uh he starts to read it and he says the title of this paper is the north vitamins attack the South vitamins and there was like vitamins getting napalmed in the trenches and it was all about vitamin war and uh yeah so that was uh yeah it definitely has um it used it used to be something that I really hated X my brother is the opposite he's like 4.3 GPA um I graduate high school with a 1.25 like yeah it's not not wasn't very good good student but what I really as I'm older now I'm extremely thankful for it for three reasons I think when you're younger uh and you struggle with stuff it makes you I think not only more resilient but it makes you more empathetic like I realized that my brain doesn't work like everyone else's brain and I think when you're in a class and you get what the teacher is saying you just assume that everyone else does right and if you don't get it there's something wrong with you and so for me having a learning disability it made me realize that not everyone learns the same which means not everyone's brain like takes an information identically and so it kind of really at a young age made me aware that my perceptions my experience um was not a universal truth does that make sense yeah totally and it also like made me realize that to get myself and understand myself more about how how I learned so it took me years to understand how to kind of overcome that but when I did and I um finally because I dropped out of college and finally I finally went back to college I graduated taught my class and all that kind of good stuff and eventually got into Stanford I don't think there's probably ever been anyone I could be wrong to get into Stanford that had like a 1.5 GPA when they graduated high school maybe you and Ezra client I don't think you went to Stanford but he was another that had like a GPA that bad in high school and now is serious intellectual um so as I understand it you were a firefighter for many years yeah was that right out of high school and was that at that point were you developing an interest in film or were you just seeing your path as you know working class firefighter yeah and your dad's mold my my film trajectory um came way way later in life it's when I was living in Yemen that I decided to switch careers so at that age um I became a firefighter not a lot of people assume it's because my dad it wasn't because my dad um I actually didn't really had any interest in firefighting uh when I was younger I mean I grew up the firehouse and we would you know I got taught how to like throw a ball and hit it and play baseball that's from some of the guys at Firehouse but it was never something that it was going to be my profession um until I moved out of the house and I had some roommates um I lived with five guys and one of them was a firefighter and he told me about it and the way he talked about it was you know it was like the best job in the world every day is different you get to work in a team you get to travel you could do physical work um and it just sounded awesome so I went through a fire academy and got hired on seasonally that first year and during the Summers I would fight fire and during the winter so I would go to college and I did that for two years and then the and then that after that second season I got offered a full-time job so I dropped out of college and became a full-time firefighter and yeah and I loved it I mean it's I really I'm really thrive in environments that are like fast-paced high-stakes problem solving that's where I feel like I perform the best and that's all firefighting is when you're on scene you have to make you have to take in a loads of information really fast and be very decisive about it and you know you don't just run into a brain building you look at the building construction you look at like you know things around it there's a lot of ingestive information to be able to come to those conclusions and I think that a lot of people when they find out that in the film industry when they find out that I used to be a firefighter they're always so surprised they think it has like nothing in common right and I always argue that I think the thing that made me a really good firefighter that are the things that also make me a really good documentary filmmaker so in firefighting you have to have obviously physicalness and all other kind of stuff but I think I would say that the best firefighters that I worked with had extreme empathy and we're really good at fast-paced high stakes problem solving and that's what filmmaking is when you do the kind of films that I do so you seem like the kind of person that rushes towards danger at some level and and so part of your story that I'm interested in is when 9 11 happened you reacted by you know going to Afghanistan and traveling to the source of you know the the people that had just attacked us I guess that was mostly Saudi Arabia as well but um you know most People's Natural Instincts upon being attacked would not be to go to the place you know where that had just attacked us what was it about you that that made your reaction to go to the Middle East and travel yeah I mean I I think for me and I talked about this uh with Sam a little bit is you know my dad always said that there is only three types of people in the world you know and those when you hit them they just want to hit you right back you hurt me I'm gonna hurt you those when you hit them they just run away they're like I don't wanna I don't want to even deal with this right now and those that when you hit them they're just like well why why did you just hit me and for me I do think that I've just always been wired that way and so immediately after 9 11 I started reading a lot of books about Islam I started reading a lot of books about the politics of the Middle East and some books about Arabic and I watched the news incessantly and documentaries and I think for me it was seen these sources of information completely contradicting each other so for example I'd read about Islam and you know some of the rules and and one book would say in Islam you're not allowed to kill innocent people and then I would watch the news and the News would say this is a violent religion that's just bloodthirsty and when you have no experience in the Middle East when you when you don't really have at that time any Muslim friends I had no idea how to decipher which one of these was true and I realized after a while that each one of these inputs of information be it a t like the news or books was was information through someone else's filter in order for me to like really understand I had to remove that filter and so that's why a little bit over six months after 9 11 I went to Afghanistan to try to find those answers for myself and um I think that experience just really humbled me and I mean I wasn't like you when I was in my early 20s I was definitely like a know-it-all like like I had a very strong world view and that just put it in check and I think that were you going over there with the intention to film people or just to meet people no I wasn't home yeah I wasn't even in the film industry then I went over there because I had questions and the questions weren't being answered in mainstream media and so were you just going up to people on the street and saying hey I literally hitchhiked across the border from Pakistan to Afghanistan and just talk to people along the way stayed with different families um a family took me in and then anytime I went to a different town they're like oh I have a cousin there you should stay with him and literally there was just one extended family that I would just they would like just put me up in every place that I went because they had cousins everywhere and so which is pretty common um over there and and so the first trip because I've been back since then but that first trip it was I just stayed with local Afghan families and um one of the really uh one of the things that I remember most vividly and the thing that really kind of stuck with me was I went to a town that was near a place called Mazar Sharif um and so it was a small village and I stayed with a family there um that were I think uncles of the people that I met when I when I incapable and they didn't speak any English and I didn't speak any Pashto nadari but I have amazing Pictionary and charade skills uh and so we got along great and it was like the second or third day I was there it's a small town so everyone knew everyone and we went to the market and about three or four days before I arrived there had been a huge bomb that had been dropped on the neighborhood and it just couldn't have completely obliterated a house uh on the lower end of the block and ever killed everyone the whole entire family and it was a it's a small village it was really really devastating and you know to to just emphasize that anymore here's a country and a people who are at that very moment being bombed by my country and my government but have offered to take me in and feed me and clothe me and treat me as I wanted their own I don't know if that same thing would have happened and the United States had the rules been reversed and um one day we're walking in the market and there was a guy in the market I was with the grandfather house and this and the grandson and there was a guy across in the market who started yelling at me and I didn't know what he was saying but I could tell that he wasn't happy that I was there so the grandfather just ran up to him picked him up by the Scruff of the neck yelled something to him in in I think costumed already I'm trying to remember what language and um then the other man walked over and said you know sorry and and costume and then welcome to Afghanistan in English and that was it and like I'm sure these men knew each other for decades and but he defended me to this man and I think that that one instance alone made me realize that my understanding of the world was very skewed and that the things that I had been told in the filter that I had built up uh after watching all these news programs were wasn't the whole story and it was a very inaccurate picture I'm not sure I'm rambling on just no I didn't mean to make sense I think you know I I was recently talking to someone who just moved to America and you know was talking about the misimpression they got about Americans from watching news about Americans like they thought all of us everyone owns guns and love loves violence and uh you know it's just very easy to get a caricature of a people just by watching the news or by just you know looking at the impression you get and when you get there you you almost always realize how you know diverse societies are in terms of there are different factions that believe different things and and so forth um I want to get into uh your well to that point yeah I want to add to that real quick because I lived in Yemen for a while and you know I've been to places like Somalia and and Afghanistan and I always get whenever I come back to the States people tell me like oh my God you must have been so dangerous like were you scared for your life the whole time like those places are so like you know so violent and and it's funny because it's this perception that we get and I try to explain to people in the fact that like imagine that you knew know absolutely nothing about the US you didn't know where it was on a map you'd never seen any American films you'd you know didn't even know who the president was the only thing you knew about America is what you read the New York Times about the rapes the muggins the robberies the killings school shootings you would think that the States was like Mad Max on crack right and you're like I'm never gonna go there it's so dangerous right and that's kind of how most of these countries are portrayed where there are things that happen but those that are like violent and and and it does happen here we have school shootings and and and things like that but it's not the only it's not the 100 of the reality all the time right and I think because of how our news media is set up the the Nuance the complexity is lost and I think it's like very sensationalistic stories is kind of all that we hear about I would I would also be afraid of being an outsider who doesn't speak the language yeah and that for me would connect to my fears of the violence or like if I if I knew something about the society if I spoke the language I would trust my ability to navigate safely but being an outsider who didn't speak the language it would magnify my fears as being almost anywhere and certainly a place with some you know some problems of violence right yeah well I mean I think it was funny so I had my parents come visit me when I was in Yemen and they'd never been there and in Yemen especially in in Santa anyone who belongs to like um any kind of Clan or whatnot they'll they'll wear an AK-47 like so there's a lot of people just walking around the streets in the Capitol with just an AK-47 slung over their shoulder and if you're not familiar with that like when my dad came he was really alarmed he's like oh my God this is like a violent country everyone's carrying around the ak-47. I was like Dad it's not really like seen as something to like we're gonna use this every day it's more of a status symbol like I belong to a clan I have people and so I said it's kind of like if you're in New York and you're like you're like sporting a Prada purse it's like a status symbol like I'm a successful businesswoman like I can have this thing yeah and I was like just look at it like a very different kind of a a Prada person who's just like okay well it's interesting it's all about context right like Israel is like that like you will see so many soldiers in that case walking around the street with AK-47s and you don't feel unsafe because you know the context yeah in which and and there it is it's a status thing as well but you know that they're soldiers you know that it's part of a community and you know I've talked to people a little bit from a different age now in parts of America where everyone grew up bringing a rifle to school yeah you know and they didn't get in fights all the time they weren't you know that they you know I'd be more afraid of mass shootings today than in some of those tight-knit communities where it's just culturally everyone has a rifle with them so it is it there's a lot more to be said about it than just the mere fact of having guns yeah no I think it's a culture surrounding the gun ownership often that isn't the problem what I have learned is facts without context is not truth it's propaganda so if I'm just giving you facts and I don't give you the context around it then it's just that's not the truth and I think that if you're giving you know statistics about gun ownership in America and that's the only number you give me it's like oh they must be like gun crazy over there and then you kind of go into it more about uh you know a lot of people own a lot of guns right there's a lot of people don't know any guns and kind of the statistics and the math behind it I think that like I don't know I just feel that there are a lot of people who have forgotten how important context is it's sometimes it's everything yeah so your documentary which is excellent and what did you think of it I thought it was so I went into it with no preconceptions really I I you know 30 or 40 minutes into the documentary and just to give a brief summary of this documentary it follows closely uh a few terrorists though they hadn't been convicted either in the U.S or Saudi Arabia some of them in the course of the film sort of admitted to involvement with terrorism held in Guantanamo Bay for about 15 years and then through a Saudi government program we're allowed to come to Saudi Arabia and participate in a a a really you know healthy from my vantage point rehab program like a true rehabilitation program and and your film follows them in that rehab program um struggling to adjust to life you know outside of a cage and then another approximately year and a half of them struggling to reintegrate into Saudi society as as yemenis which was also um um so my impression was I think you know 30 minutes into the film I said to myself there is no way that you can hate these guys even just this quickly into the film right like at the very very beginning of the film you have no idea what to think of them they're from another culture they've probably they've probably killed people maybe many people maybe many innocent people and yet 30 45 minutes into the film I can see I can see myself in this person right I can see how a psychologically normal person given the right life experiences and the wrong well really the wrong life experiences could go down this path yeah um so that was my impression of the film it was clearly a humanizing portrait people without without whitewashing anything that they had done yeah so you know to me as as a consumer of documentary that is often what I like most is is when you know just simply by showing someone simply by asking them the right question getting them talking you recast your previously held Notions about a person or about a topic and I thought it did a great job of that I thought it was uh you know interestingly if you had shown me the documentary in full and then asked me told me Coleman some people are going to get offended by that by this documentary who are those people going to be I would have guessed probably focus on the American right that uh hold the wound of 9 11 and uh uh you know jihadist terrorism very closely to their heart will probably get offended at the fact that this humanizes jihadist Terror yeah that would have been my guest of of who would have gotten offended we'll get into who did get offended and the Fallout of that but that was my basic reaction to yeah to the documentary yeah I think you know the film for in the in the course of making a film I interviewed about 150 over 150 of these guys and um about 30 of that 150 you were interested in doing the project and then 12 of those 30 were interested in doing the project without any kind of like disguise with their face being blurred and for me it was really important that you see these men's eyes so that you could see their Humanity because that's where we connect with other human beings and so there was there was always this throughout making this film I was time and time again realized that that the perception and how perception sometimes integrates into our psyche fact and then you have this experience of like oh [ __ ] like this is this is just perceived um idea of who these men are and what they're about and so what was interesting for me is as I was making the film and talking to these men and spending so much time with them it reminded me of this story that my dad told me when I was little about a fishing Village in Northern California that had a problem with invasive starfish and he said that one day all the fishermen got together and they decided all right once and for all we just need to get rid of starfish we need to Kill Them All so they gather all the starfish up and they cut them up into three four five pieces thinking they're dead they threw those pieces back into the ocean not knowing that starfish regenerate right so then the starfish population just exploded devastated the local fishing economy the moral of the story being when you try to fix a problem you do not understand you typically made it worse now the day after 9 11 most experts put the number of al-Qaeda members around 400. um before the Pandemic those same experts put the number of al-Qaeda around a hundred thousand give or take including affiliate groups so basically the US has been starfishing the [ __ ] of the Middle East the past two decades because we do not understand these men we do not understand what actually motivates them we do not understand who they are as people and there's a expert in this field called Ali soufan and he has for years been saying that he's like you cannot fix a problem you do not understand these men and we do not understand these men and so for me the film just seeks to understand who these men are on a human level right and let them tell their own stories and hear their perspective and just give a space for that um and I think in doing so it's really hard not to see the humanity in them and it's really hard not to see the similarities and I think what was a big surprise for me in terms of audience was that a large pot portion of the vet Community who saw the film were really impacted by it in a very positive way which I didn't didn't see coming I had a lot of vets reach out and um say that they found the film healing they say that they found the film to be something that like was kind of a missing piece of their experience over there that filled in a lot of blanks for them and I had you know a lot of guys you know had a very similar sentiment and like so for example one guy wrote me and he said you know I would never admit this to anyone publicly but I miss War I don't miss the fighting or yoga being shot at I miss the Brotherhood I missed the camaraderie and I missed a sense of purpose and since I've got back to the States I haven't found that anywhere I've been I've been longing for that and I'm just like I just feel that it's just not here and then I haven't seen that until I saw your film and these guys have that same Brotherhood these guys talked about the same sense of purpose he's like it was really alarming for me because these were the men that I was sent to kill and what I realized after watching your film is that I had way more in common with the men that I was sent to kill than the people who sent me there in the first place that's remarkable because in one level most wars are like this right like we send disproportionately the poor members of our society um usually men to go kill other poor men from other countries and that experience of you know let's call it alienation right it's like there's a lot of alienated young men don't feel that they have a great role to fill in their society that are looking for purpose and meaning and struggle yeah Noble struggle yeah and actually prefer that adversity to a quiet but meaningless life where they don't feel like they are contributing like they are essential and you know at some level those men can understand and resonate psychologically with the soldiers they're trying to kill more so than you know the people as you said who who were sent to kill them and fundamentally I think of this problem of reintegrating soldiers into society as this and this is something I could even understand in my own psychology but it's like you go from having one big problem in life yeah which is survive you know protect my brothers yeah one big problem only one problem and suddenly you go from having one big problem to having many many small problems right yeah which is for some people much easier but for a certain type A Certain cast of mind it's actually much easier to have one big problem than to have many Smiles that's one that's one thing that really resonates with me because a lot of people say you know when they find out my background and all the stuff that I've done over the course of you know my life I mean I've kidnapped I lived in the Middle East Somalia Afghanistan Iraq they always think oh my God you're so brave like you must I'm like no that for me that's not a big that doesn't cause me a lot of anxiety but every tax season when I have to fill out that paperwork that I do not understand I have like a mental breakdown emergencies don't actually cause anxiety they actually get rid of anxiety in my personal experience anytime I've had like you know a family with a health emergency where yeah the next two weeks I have one problem which is to make sure my family member stays alive yeah I never feel anxious really in those situations because you have to be a soldier and they're as horrible as it is uh it's actually clarifying in some sense that's very tasks and goal oriented exactly this is the thing I need to do okay what are the things that aren't going to get me there right and it's a very it's a focus and it's like a a kind of you know determination and drive that in those situations requires it of you in order to like get through it or survive it or to achieve what you need to do and I think when the way that I describe the way my brain works is that most of the time um in relaxing situations uh I feel like if I had to give a visual of my brain it's like a pack of drunken monkeys just like jumping around everywhere up there um but then like when I was firefighting when I went on a call and it was a really bad call like you know multi-car pile up or something like that um all the monkeys would just get in a single fire line and be quiet and I always thought that I was wired backwards because I think a lot of other people you know when there's a huge emergency kind of you know fight flight all that kind of stuff but for me it's where I feel like I come into my own and I'm able to really focus and do what needs to be done and I think that it made a lot of sense when you just said that because I do think it's it this kind of kind of environment does attract a certain kind of person sure yeah so another question I wanted to ask you is in this rehabilitation program you talked to 150 guys and ended up you know three or four of them ended up being the real through line and focal point of it uh so did you feel you could tell at all who was really rehabilitating and really changing and forming a commitment to live to to not go back to Jihad and who was actually just trying to say the right things and deceive so they could get out of there I mean I spent quite a lot of time with these guys and I remember in the film that the art therapist Dr butter um he sweet sweet man and I remember talking to him once because I was curious what he thought and I said if you had to rank the men in terms of not worried at all once he gets out of the stage out of the rehab center like you know a little worried um could go either way or like hmm and he said if it was we wouldn't we wouldn't let him go because they do all this evaluation before they follow them out but his ranking was this exactly the same as mine in terms of who I thought was most going to be at risk and who I was worried about and who I didn't really have any worries about um but I think yeah I mean I followed four men throughout the film one of them dropped out halfway through and what I like about the film because early on someone told me oh just you have too many characters just focus on one and for me it was like if I did that it would kind of defeat the purpose in terms of the film because it was taking this very complex and nuanced look at this topic and one of the reasons there are four characters is because after talking to all the you know over 150 men I realized that there was four basic different motivations about why they joined these groups and there there were exceptions obviously um but they would fall into one of four categories and I think that for me once I kind of realized that pattern it helped me in choosing the characters of the film kind of represent those different motivations um what were those uh so the first one I think that most Americans are familiar with is the cause right so you see um Muslims being you know oppressed or persecuted or or violently killed in a different country and you feel that it is your religious duty to go and defend them and that's Abu Ghana in the film he saw Muslims being slaughtered in Bosnia and the West was doing nothing and he's like you know these are my fellow Muslims like someone has to do something so if no one else is going to help them I am and so he went there and I think that's the the motivation that most people in the states are familiar with um but the other three have nothing to do with religion and I think those the other three are not really talked about a lot and they are the second motivation is um economic necessity and that's not her right he for him this was a career he started when he was young and a teenager he was having a hard time finding a job and this became a steady paycheck for him and so from I think he started in age 16 until I think 2000 so from age 16 and he went to Guantanamo when he was in his late 20s early 30s yeah so I think that it was using this for a while and it was his his profession for lack of a better word and then the other two um the third the third motivation is peer pressure right so that's Ali his brother was one of the lead instructors at Alpha Rook training camp in Afghanistan and in the Middle East it's very different than in the US in terms of the culture here were very individualistic so if my brother told me to do something I'd be like [ __ ] off I'm gonna do whatever I want right there we don't have a strong Community here like they do there and then we don't have as strong at least my experience is not as strong family ties um here but over there if you're an older sibling or your father tells you to do something you do it and so so Ali went to a training camp because peer pressure and the last one which is more age-dependent more for the younger men is sense of adventure that's Muhammad right he says in the movie you know I was 19 I didn't like school I didn't want to work this guy offered me a free ticket to go shoot rockets in Afghanistan like why not and what was really interesting and so Sebastian younger came to the screen last night and he did the Q a with me and he's you know he's been in the vet world for a really long time he's written a lot of books on it and we had this conversation about how the motive those four motivations the cause economic necessity sense of adventure and peer pressure also mirror similar motivations about why people joined the U.S military right right so maybe except for peer pressure but the other three I think are really strong peer pressure I would say would be the way I would Define peer pressure so you have obviously the Cause right so that would I knew a lot of people who joined up after 9 11. yeah right the cause uh economic necessity I come from working class and so a lot of people I know can't afford college so they went to the military to be able to pay for that college right right the third one peer pressure I know a lot of people who come from military families and it's a very proud thing and you know uncles aunts fathers brothers are all in the military it's very similar in that aspect peer pressure might be the wrong word but it's like it's a it's a friend or family kind of thing that's in it sets in the zeitgeist and the last one sense of adventure again I know a lot of people who in order to see the world and travel military is the best option for that and so what I realized after talking to so many men is that it was never about Good and Evil is about time and Circumstance right so for example when I was in Yemen it had like last night was really interesting after the screening I went to a deli and it was owned by yemeni Manoa I started talking to him all the best delis in in Harlem and New York in general are generally owned by MX yeah it's yeah it lived in Holland for four years I think 90 of the best delis were owned by Ms which is an interesting story I'd love to see an article explaining that history well I think it's really interesting I went in and I heard the that it was on and I the radio was on and it was it was Arabic so I was just kind of eavesdropping on it and then I heard Ali Abu Salah and that was the president of Yemen when I was there and I was like wait a minute and then I started really listening and I looked at the guy and I in Arabic I was like are you from Yemen he's like yeah like you know how did you know I'm like I used to live so we just started talking and he was telling me you know that the place that he's from in Yemen hasn't had electricity for the last eight years and all the schools all the public schools are closed and so the only schools that are open are you if you can pay money and most people can't and so according to him there's this whole generation now that's growing up that the only free schools are the madrasas and a lot of people either aren't saying their kid to school or sending them there and so imagine being this in this time of circumstances where you aren't getting education there's like a lot of things going on in your country that is just tumultuous and compare that upbringing to when I was there when you had public schools and you had you know other options and I think things have changed so much in Yemen to where when we're talking about time and Circumstance it's not just being in a country or religion it's like when are you in that space and how are you operating in that space and how is that affecting your decision making the filter that you which you see the world and in essence your your life trajectory yeah so yeah I mean I feel like I think again context context context context yeah so as a documentary filmmaker there is this Perpetual problem or or challenge you have where uh on the one hand at some level you have to befriend your subjects you have to you can't have an antagonistic relation with relationship with them at the very least there has to be some camaraderie and eventually maybe some warmth even to keep it going on the other hand you may have to show things about them that they don't want the world to see so there's there's one scene where the documentary where uh one of the subjects is starting to smoke a hookah yeah which obviously I don't think is a big deal and I've done many times yeah but for him he doesn't want his dad he doesn't want his dad specifically to see that which is so relatable yeah yeah it's like it's like when you're in high school and you go smoke a cigarette outside in the garage hoping yeah Mom to see that yeah you know I don't actually think it's a big deal but you did show the beginning of him doing that right you shut off the camera when he asked you to but it's still you know so how do you negotiate that trade-off as you know wanting to be their friends as opposed to sometimes showing parts of them they may not want the world to see yeah I think before you do I mean everyone's different um but before you do any project I think it's good to to know where the red lines are and um different projects they're different red lines what what I mean by Redline is that we're just not going to go there um some people it's politics some people it's you know just choiced of of you know beliefs and leaning and and whatnot some people are doing a piece on like you know a celebrity and it's part of the contract is you can't show XYZ so it depends on the project but for me it's always been I don't show anything or I or if I if I have something that was going to go in the film that is going to put the subject in the film In Harm's Way right so if he was actually smoking weed or doing drugs that were illegal I wouldn't show that in the film because that would get him thrown in prison um but his dad uh was not so so Muhammad was always a bit of a rebel and he would describe himself I mean the saying is which means in Arabic it means every house has a toilet but the actual Trend meaning the translation is you're the black sheep of the family right and so he was definitely the the black sheep of that family and his dad was kind of constantly riding him and any kind of hint that Muhammad was doing anything untoward he would really jump on him for right and so even though hookah is not a big thing it's also not a good thing either and his dad was just really conscious of not having having him like slip into like the bad way again and so you know we were hanging out and smoking hookah and it was this bachelor path that he shares with a bunch of friends and they watch MTV music videos and listen to really loud music and and talk about football and stuff like that and it was just shared by these this community of young of young yemeni men and uh yeah but his we I started filming it was fine and then as soon as I turned the camera on him he's just like and he had the hookah in his hand he's like I don't want my dad to see because I don't want to yell that again and you know I think for me the way that I when I talk to my subject it's like listen if there's anything that you want to tell me or anything you don't want me to show you have to say before so for example if I'm you're interviewing me and if we've agreed that say you know if something's off the Record you have to say what's off the record and then after whatever you say is off the Record but you can't give an interview and then two months later be like hey that one part was off the Record right so I said as long as you tell me beforehand it won't go in the film but if you tell me like five months later then that's just not how this works right um and I'm always very clear about that because I think it's good that everyone is on the same page and I know you know how a documentary is made and how you're making it and so for example with these men I have a a policy that I never meet subjects with a camera I always meet them first without a camera it's just me and them talking um and I do that because making a documentary is different than just interviewing someone on a one-off right so most reporters that had gone to the center before weren't only allowed for in like a one or two hours and they have to get to the point really quickly and they like they need these answers they need that sound by it and for me I had the time and the space and the grace to get to know these men on a different level so the first time I met with them it wasn't imperative that I found out where all the bodies are buried and for me that first meeting is all about explaining what a documentary is and how it's made and then what I always tell people is I'm going to be in your life for a really long time I'm going to ask you a lot of personal questions and I want you to feel comfortable with me and if you don't then I don't want you to do the project for two reasons number one I had a documentary made about me and I wasn't really involved in it and it was very inaccurate and a really horrible experience and I wouldn't wish that on anyone the second one is is that you know if you're over the age of 20 25 you have enough life experience to where you know when someone's being genuine and sincere with you and if you're filming someone and they're uncomfortable that will come through on the camera and what I like about the film is it's very clear that these guys are very comfortable with me and they trust me and so for that first meeting what I always tell people is I want you to be comfortable with me so for this first interview you can ask me any question you want and I'll answer honestly I mean any question and um so they basically essentially interview me and at the end of it I say if you're comfortable with me and you want to do the project you know let's move forward but if not I completely understand and I think it was doubly important to do it in this instance because these men had been tortured and terrier for 15 years and so I wanted to like set the bars like this is not that it also seemed like towards the beginning of the documentary before you had reached the peak of your rapport with them many of them were treating it like it might be an interrogation and you could totally sense that they were treating it like anything like anything they say would be used against them in a court of law and you can hear that yeah and then I think what was interesting is and this is what I wanted to represent in the film you see in the very beginning like they're skeptical of me I'm skeptical again we're both kind of guarded and then as the film goes on there's this opening up and there's a vulnerability that comes on both sides right and I think that that to me is what was really interesting about about that journey and portraying that in the film because when you make a film you want to meet the audience where they're at and I wanted to be very transparent about where I was in the beginning definitely where it wasn't where it was when I was at the end of filming this and so you see those first couple of interactions where they're really guarded and I'm just skeptical and then you kind of have this very I think beautiful kind of opening up of of these men their stories and their and their emotional Journeys yeah so I mentioned earlier in the interview if you had just shown this to me told me somebody's outraged about it I certainly would have said that it was folks on the right that that are you know carry the wound of jihadist terrorism very close to them to humanize the enemy would have been an affront to some people yeah and and I could I could even understand that from their perspective I would not have guessed that uh you would have gotten critiques from Muslim and Arab filmmakers filmmakers who who are saying that you are perpetuating harmful stereotypes about your subject that's not something I would have guessed based on the content of the documentary itself so and it's you know the story of how your documentary initially was widely maybe not widely but but very um duly praised yeah at Sundance and received very well and also received very well by you know Muslim American audiences and audiences of color and then later it seemed like a handful of Arab and Muslim filmmakers you know said this is horrible it's a white woman that's behind this and she ought not tell stories that are from our culture uh and then you know it was my understanding of this situation is that a lot of people associated with the film producers and Sundance people all of a sudden pretend pretended they didn't love the movie that they actually saw and that they agreed with the criticisms and um you know firing squatted you basically which is um it's really it's really a terrible thing you know it strikes me as as cowardly in the sense that if you're going to be associated with a film and believe in a project and then you know a small number of people criticize it on grounds that you almost certainly disagree with having been involved with the project this is a I mean the condition we live in is people have something to lose people have jobs to lose yeah and but it nevertheless it is cowardly and it's it's a betrayal if in fact you believe in the project right so I mean the whole dynamics of cancellation around this were very troubling to me for that reason because it seems so clear to me that the people uh you know the the people essentially backstabbing you basically saying oh yeah no sorry I disavowed the project yeah Mex Maker's horrible they could not possibly have really believed what they were saying if they honestly held that opinion then it's just a conversation right yeah but it's it seems very unlike likely to me that they actually thought you should have told you shouldn't have told the story as a white woman which was a big critique yeah um and so I guess my question is what was that experience like for you to um to feel that critique in the first place I guess let's start there what do you make of the substance of the critique that you as a white woman should not have told this story well I mean I think to be to be completely I mean it might between the weeds but the the criticisms have evolved over time um and the attacks have evolved over time but I think that my personal belief is I do know that they're in the documentary space in the independent documentary space there is a camp of people who believe that you should not be allowed to tell a story over a community that you're not a part of and there's a fraction of of the documentation can I stop you there though because I actually think to be more specific it's that white people should not tell because like this this critique would never be leveled at someone like Dia Khan for doing her great documentary the white right right I don't remember anyone saying as an Afghani Pakistani well she's from the Netherlands I think but that's her Heritage she she doesn't get to tell a story about the white right it's actually only yeah specifically white people are not supposed to tell it's funny you mentioned that because I'm just going to tell a little anecdote here um I have I had a friend no longer friends after all this but I had a friend who was a documentary filmmaker and there was a Tiger Woods documentary that was made by this gentleman called very talented filmmaker Matthew heinemann and he'd make previous documentaries this is this the big one that was on HBO like yeah and so um yeah HP had hired him and uh there was this filmmaker that I knew that was going on social media and just slamming him just really attacking him about like you know like he shouldn't be directing this he's white they should have got black director to do this this is like ridiculous you know and then you know and I I didn't argue with her because I'm just like that's what you believe okay that's fine I disagree with you I think for me I don't care who made the film it's about the work itself right right so if you made a film like a good example of this is a As A Firefighter for a long time and I don't watch firefighting movies and I don't read books about firefighting because every time I see them they're just so [ __ ] inaccurate that as a jazz musician actually La La Land is kind of nice okay Whiplash I can't see yeah okay so yeah I think that like I think when you're that close to it you're just like and and so Sebastian younger has written amazing books you know War um a tribe uh a perfect storm and he wrote one book called fire and even though I'm a huge fan of Sebastian's work it's a book that I never read on purpose because I was just like there's this is the one thing I know a lot about I'm I know that I'm gonna like not like this book right and then finally I kind of like so one thing I haven't read of this I'll read it and it was so well researched it's the only thing I've ever read on firefight that would I would say is very accurate in terms of culture in terms of like he goes really into the weeds and he did his due diligence and the thing is is that the works vote for itself yeah right and so for me that's where I come from like Sebastian younger is not a firefighter he has no background in firefighting but he was able to put in the work and the blood blood and the sweat and the tears and do such a deep dive and have a curious mind and be humble about like the things he didn't know that he was able to create a book that I would say is probably the best book I've ever read on firefighting and what it is to be a firefighter and so when this person came to me and or I saw them posted on social media the the movie hadn't been out yet it would just announced by HBO so no one had seen it and I'm just like why don't we just wait to watch it because if it's good then I don't think it matters fast forward a couple years the same filmmaker who is from Sarah Asian have Asian background and and whatnot uh they reach out to me like I want to do a film in Saudi Arabia you know Asian American um you know I've never been there um who's your fixer because she knew I was working on this project and in my brain I'm like uh how can you in one breath say Matthew heinemann can't make a feel about Tiger Woods but you as a non-muslim as not in on Arab as an American Asian filmmaker you think it's okay for you to make this film and so in my brain I also was saying like I don't have a fixer because if you're gonna make a film in a place like Saudi Arabia or North Korea you don't want to be bringing someone with you around everywhere you go and they know that they're involved in the project and then you leave and they stay there and the people might not be happy or the government might be happy with the project and that person is seen as being part of the actual storytelling and editing they're not a subject of the film right so they actually have some kind of input into this and if the government doesn't like the film you make that person's in Jeopardy right so you if you if you're going to make a film in a place like Saudi Arabia in my opinion you should not have a fixer um and so it was really interesting to me that that particular filmmaker could criticize a film that she'd never seen based on the uh the director's skin color and then in the same breath go around and want to make a film at a place that she'd never been to and had no background in and so yeah it was just it was strange for me just to see that I think but yeah as a thought experiment if your film were identical in every way and uh but but you happen to be Arab I don't think anyone would have criticized I mean you you may have leveled some or people may have level some critiques of the film as a film some minor whatever criticisms I don't think anyone would have called the film islamophobic or anything like that with the same content I think that that's probably the case that's what that's my exact producers who's yemeni and Muslim he's he said the same thing multiple times yeah so I mean this is this this attitude this is it's sort of coming from standpoint epistemology and post-modernism this notion that you cannot possibly bridge the gap between identities uh no matter how much work you put in I mean this is something that strikes me just as a poison for creativity it's a flattening of human beings yeah I think so I think for me not only is it the flat in human beings but it kind of ignores what makes us human to begin with and what I mean by that is you know within with making this film if on paper right if you look at someone like so naughter in the film is one of the first guys that I really connected with and on paper we have absolutely nothing in common like he's yemeni uh Muslim 44 uh ex-member of you know Taliban Al-Qaeda I at the time I was 36 um you know woman American ex-firefighter on paper we had absolutely nothing in common but one thing that I will kind of say is like when you're a firefighter you see a lot of horrific [ __ ] and your job is basically to um you you witness people's most traumatic moment of their lives on a daily basis and you see a lot of really bad things and after a while it does take its toll and so we have to find a way to kind of like process it and decompress and how firefighters are the ones that I worked with anyway chose to do that was through humor like really dark very Politically Incorrect humor that would probably get you fired in any other job and I only heard and and that kind of humor in one other profession and that was like military folks who'd seen combat and it was just a way to kind of decompress and like laugh about things and kind of like make things lighter and I never just had or saw that anywhere else you know outside of those two jobs until I met naughter when I first met naughter he told me stories about Guantanamo horrific stories about things that he experienced but he did it all with a smile on his face and through bouts of uncontrolled laughter and through really dark jokes and we were when we were you know filming he the guys in the room you know all men and some Arabs um kind of all thought naughter was some kind of psychopath right or that I thought it was just flat outline lying but I knew better because not her so told the same kind of jokes that my old firefighter buddies told me which meant that he was he was still processing trauma and he was trying to decompress and so he kind of bonded with our shared love of inappropriate humor and I would tell a joke and he would laugh and he would tell a joke like he said to me once he's like Meg you should go on Guantanamo diet you lose 40 pounds one month look great he was talking about like hunger strikes right he's talking about hunger strikes yeah and um so we just kind of really quickly bonded and you know I saw him in a way even though that I was white non-muslim non-arab and a woman I saw things in him and I connected things like as a as a human being with him that no one else in that room did knowing what that is the same race or religion or sex because humans are more than just the boxes that you check on a census they are we're made up of things that they don't even have boxes for and finding connection to other human beings through those various levels is what connects us it's what how we build our understanding it's how we build connection and community and it's how we build these relationships that make up our social kind of you know group so Arab American and Muslim American audiences that see this film not through the filter of the controversy but just nakedly just see the film are largely enjoyed it yes yeah and and so the the small minority of filmmakers um and I think it's relevant that they were filmmakers that that I think that's relevant to say that when the attack started it was a day after the announcement which is before anyone had seen the film so the motives of that small minority uh the the heckler's veto so to speak that strikes me as interesting because it's something I've seen a lot in my life so to make a analogy when I was at Columbia you know they assigned way too much reading every week yeah they assign Morgan yeah for you it would have been really hell on Earth yeah for me it was it was bad yeah and but there's just one thing you can do if you happen to be a black student like I was or a student of color which is whatever the reading was instead of doing it you could basically condemn it if it was by a white person you could say it really yeah you could I would say well this reading is actually you know our professor would have us we have to go around and say something about the reading right to suss out whether we'd actually done it if you hadn't really done it you could say well I think it's really problematic Jon Stewart Mill's a white guy and I'm not sure he was really thinking about and everyone was going oh that's a pretty good point you didn't really have to do the work right wait wait just so I'm clear because again it's been a while since I've been at University so uh it definitely was not like that when I was in university no I don't think it was like that but but you could wait a minute you can say like oh yeah and you can get out of a sign reading like that you could I mean so so you would have to go around and say something intelligent about what we were supposed to read yeah every class yeah in a class like lit hum for example which is part of the core curriculum and we're reading the Canon most of which is white men not all of which so there's always this rip cord you can pull for the inevitable days when like you're not gonna uh do the assignment which is to take the identity lens right and yeah this whole point of doing reading like that at least my because there's stuff I read at Stanford I was like this is horseshit but like it's good to like I don't know like I think it's very strange for me to have to be able to come from something and say like I'm going to go through life and anything that I don't agree with anything that's not in my same kind of like thought process like I don't want to hear about it and it shouldn't exist that's kind of what you're saying I'm saying something a little bit more specific which is that as a person of color in certain uh highly Progressive subcultures in the past maybe six to eight years you have this option of rather than consuming the text consuming the content and that you know giving your opinion of it doing the work you have this option of pulling the rip cord of identity and saying oh it's a white person right and that's what I feel the the small minority of filmmakers that took issue with your film that's what I feel that they're doing rather than really just uh they may even be some Envy involved like what a great documentary I wish I had done this myself but I didn't and so you have the option of pulling this rip cord of oh you're a white person you're a man you should not have told this story this is our story and it's there is some self-interest in my opinion there's there's it's a very tempting option if you're a person of color to pull that rip cord and it's something more I've seen more and more people do in literature and young adult fiction in filmmaking over the past six to eight years yeah so that's just my analysis of the issue as an outsider yeah I think I think I think what I would say is like let's I would say from the time that it was announced to Sundance it was a little under two months so it was being attacked by a by a group of people that hadn't seen it for a while but I also want to give people the benefit of the doubt okay let's say they did watch it at Sundance and they were offended by it okay um that is okay too yeah I'm fine with that I am fine with criticism I think criticism is part of the uh process when you put things out into the world I think criticism can sometimes make you a better Storyteller a better journalist a better writer a better filmmaker but there's a line between criticizing a piece of work and literally trying to get it blacklisted oh totally yeah and I think that for me um like I told you I'd been kidnapped and when I came back after that uh like with it I think you mentioned it oh I didn't mention this I had heard about this but I did I do want to well so when I was telling that you were kidnapped yeah so when I was kidnapped um seven people that I knew were disemboweled and decapitated and it was very you know it was a very intense situation we have to introduce that story a little bit more where were you why were you there I was in Columbia I was going through from I was going from Panama into Colombia and we were crossing over the daring Gap but but what I want to say to your point was when I got back to the States um I think I don't know how long after I was back here I went to go to the movie theater and I saw Bruce Willis movie I think it was called Tears of the Sun or under the sun anyway it's a it's a there's a rebel group that's going into Villages just slaughtering people like cutting off a woman's breasts and things like that and I saw that film and it was it was really hard for me and I didn't really want to finish it and I would say that if if ever a film emotionally kind of disturbed me in a way it was that film but I never in a million years would say like this film emotionally like hurt me therefore no one else can watch it yeah it's just like hey note to self like after I saw that film like I probably shouldn't be watching any violent uh action movies that take place in the jungle for the next couple years I'm just not I'm just not there yet um and I did feel really affected by that in a negative way but I would never write to the studio and say you have to pull this film because I was really triggered by this and therefore I don't think it's safe for anyone else to watch I mean for me that's such an elitist and arrogant stance to take because at the end of the day you can watch the film have the exact opposite response to that like there was a film that came out years ago called the four lions and it was a very divisive film um because it was this dark comedy I love the film I was brilliant about suicide bombers and um before the film ever premiered there was all this controversy around it and half the people that I knew who were Muslim love that film the other half thought it was the worst thing ever made and I think what was a really disturbing about sundance's response is when the pushback started before after the announcement they started to waver and I was advised by a person like hey there's a bunch of Muslims writing letters to Sundance tell him to pull the film what you need to do is reach out to the community who's already seen the film who support the film and have them write letters to Sundance in support of it so which so I did so I went to the the yamny community who'd seen the film who'd screen the film beforehand wrote a bunch of letters to Sundance saying why the film was important to them and Sundance knew this um and so later on you know after the film premiered there about a month later Sundance issued an apology and that apology to what was to all Muslim Muslims and Arabs that we offended mus all Muslims and Arabs with this I was like no you didn't and you know that because there's a huge group of people from the community who love this film who want people to see this film and you're basically treating this Muslim Community as a monolith and you know better because there's no Community that's a monolith right right and because a handful of people complained about the film you now feel compelled to apologize for it because you think that these handful people are offended therefore everyone must be offended by it and what was really interesting is the film got pulled from all these other film festivals like South by and San Francisco documentary film festival and no other Film Festival would touch it except for a film festival in New Zealand called doc Edge and then eventually we played in Zurich and this is what was really interesting about that film festival they'd accept the film and then they started to waver and they wanted to know all these questions after the controversy of the film we were going back and forth on email I finally said listen that's just we'll Zoom you can ask me any question you want I just need to answer now because I'm not gonna jump through Hoots for the next four months and so we went on zoom and we talked and they had no idea about all the other stuff that was going on behind the scenes so they yeah like yeah we really want to play this but it's too late now to go in competition but we want to do a special screening and here's what we're going to do we're gonna have a debate and you're gonna bait debate someone from the other side after the film and I said that's fine as long as they've watched the film they're not going to ask me a question that I haven't already thought about of like a million times right so there's this very very famous uh uh filmmaker who's Muslim and from Iraq in in Switzerland named uh Samir and they introduced us over email and I assumed that he'd seen the film because they were setting it up like this guy was on the other side and we were going to debate each side he wrote to me he's like actually no I haven't seen it yet so they just assumed because he was Muslim that he would hate this thing so I was like he's like I would really love to see the film so I can prepare notes for our debate I was like sure and I sent him a link he writes me back and he goes I love this film it's brilliant he's like I mean he's like I could I couldn't be on a debate but I'm going to be on your side so you have to find someone else for other side because I think this is a great film and here's all the reasons why he's like I cannot believe you pulled this off I'm from the Middle East I know how hard this would be and he's like I the access you got was just blew my mind and so it's funny because originally the film festival had posted on their website like the most controversial film of the Year followed by a heated babe they had to change that to be like it's premiering on this date with a conversation to follow with Samira and so it was kind of like even they perceive like I mean we saw it but clearly every Muslim must hate this if this was what happened and then one of the most prominent Muslim filmmakers in in their country saw it was like no this is a brilliant film yeah so it was it was really interesting to me to have people watch the film and with their own eyes say yeah I really love it but clearly some people must hate it because of all the controversy around it saying like if there's smoke there should be fire but sometimes as a firefighter especially the Wildland fighter where there's sometimes the smoke isn't the smoke it's just morning fog and you think there's you think there's smoke you know over the ridge but it's just just morning fog and I think that for me what was really frustrating is like so a friend of mine who's in the yemeni community who knows about the film was basically saying that this film was really important for them for their people because we hear about Ukraine we hear about how we do it on time yeah just a couple more minutes yeah uh hear about you can hear how Syria but we don't really hear about Yemen right in the in the media much and your film touches on the things that are not being talked about right so that's yemeni's being thrown in mass in Guantanamo the carpet bombing of Yemen all these things and what was really frustrating for some of the people who worked on the film from the community was they put all this time effort and energy and creating this thing that we were supposed to be bring up some issues that we weren't talking about and instead of talking about what's in the film itself we wound up talking about who made it right and and basically the analogy was it's like we spent all this time effort and energy to create a rally to raise awareness for breast cancer at the last minute a handful of people show up screaming at their top their lungs about glaucoma yes glaucoma's bad but breast cancer is worse and this is not the glaucoma rally this is a breast cancer rally and what what my executive producer who's yemi said he said you know I was born in Yemen raised there in the Middle East everyone treats uh Yemen like it's the Mexico of the Middle East right right we're all labor We're Not educated we just and everyone looks down all our neighbors look down at us and they ignore us and you know he moved to the states and now he's a very successful businessman he said you know I thought I left it all behind and then this film that I was really proud to be a part of comes out and again my people's stories are ignored for in his words more like Elite Muslims and their agenda and he was really frustrated at that and I can't blame him and and I felt really bad because there was a lot of people behind this film from the community that was really wanting to have these discussions and that just never happened yeah but yeah thank you for doing this I had I had a great time before I let you go yeah I want to make sure that nothing in this conversation exhausted or is a substitute for actually watching the thing so uh how can people support yeah the documentary can they see it now and if not how can they support the eventuality of seeing it yeah so we like right after so the New York Times was the first one obviously that's not true Lorraine Elliott the LA Times was the first one who dropped the story but it was it was dropped as a story on the New York Times and after that happened a bunch of people reached out to me and they're like we want to help you um do you have a GoFundMe I'm like I don't but maybe I should and I started a GoFundMe page and we raised about three thousand dollars and then I went on the Sam Harris podcast and it just blew up nice and now it's like at over 700 000 people listen to that podcast and we're really compelled and because of that and that's the whole reason why I'm here so they gave all this money to help me self-distribute the film so right now we're in New York because um I took some of that money and I paid to screen it in New York and fly out here and do a q a with Sebastian younger and we're doing that right now because the film when it premiered at Sundance like the people that I was talking to sales agents PR people they're like this is going to be an Oscar film this is going to be a front-running Oscar contestants that's what I would have guessed if I had seen it yeah they're like they're like this film stays with you and notice that this might be an Oscar Contender and it's going to piss off some people on the right that's what I would have said and and yeah I remember like my PR guy at the time um he said you know literally Radford Sundance we're starting your Oscar campaign because this is this is gonna this is gonna be the film but because of the controversy and the attacks and all the other film festivals pulling the film and everyone just basically like blacklisting it that didn't happen and for me I typically when you have a film at Sundance there's two ways to qualify for the Oscars one is to what I would have done is you Premiere at Sundance you play a bunch of other film festivals and if you win an award at one of those film festivals you automatically qualify which is great because that's a free way to qualify the other way is you have to four wall the film which costs money because to rent a theater and all that kind of stuff and so because I hate rewarding bad behaviors like [ __ ] it I know we're probably not going to get like get an oscar but I want to Oscar qualify this anyway because it would have been and so um you know a fair fair yeah so fair in the Arts has been just amazing and least supportive and they hosted a screen of the film in LA in July and that's where I met Barry and and that's how Sam heard about the film and they also helped me with the screenings to Oscar qualify in Glendale this is before we had all the GoFundMe money and um so we also qualified it and what we're doing now is we're doing the of the most like budget Oscar campaign ever so we've come to New York to screen the film to do a q a to let people know who are Academy members that were in the running and you know please just watch the film and so right now if you're an Oscar member you can stream the film on the Academy's website and you see it for yourself make up your own mind and so that's one way you can see it the other way is we're going around the country basically doing these screenings and having these discussions afterwards because I think that it's it's important that people see the film but it's also more important that we have these really tough nuanced complex discussions that you really can't have on Twitter and I think that really should be done face to face yeah and so right now um the way that our industry works it's very insular and I was hoping that when the New York Times piece dropped that there would be some buyers that read that and be like hey like let's give this film a second shot let's take a second look at this and then the New York Times piece dropped the Sebastian younger piece dropped Grandma the Atlantic dropped a piece all in huge support of the film and then I went on Sam Harris and we had a GoFundMe just blow up so there's clearly an audience for this film no doubt No Doubt but crickets from buyers and I was talking to a friend of mine and they basically said the oh the only way you're going to be able to turn this around and get distribution is if some big entity in the industry cancels out what Sundance did so by Sundance apologizing for this film twice it basically put it in a coffin and my career and then when Abigail Disney who was an executive producer apologized for it it just put all the nails in that coffin and the only way to like raise the dead if you have an equally respected entity validate the film right and so the most famous entity in my business is the academy the Oscars and so I'm hoping that if we're able to do this very Grassroots campaign um if we're able to get it shortlist which is again a long shot because you know I'm still a pariah in in my industry because of this um if we're able to get the film shortlisted then maybe that will send a message to buyers that hey like this film's actually really good and it wasn't given a fair Shake yeah well it is really good and I think we have to get out of this studio but they can also see it sorry and yeah so we're doing screenings in Santa Monica or La okay at the Lemley theater and tickets literally when available today so if you want to buy tickets to that it's a week-long run where it's going to be in LA from the 9th to the 15th of December um and we're also having screenings on the 13th in Malibu and um again in I think in Beverly Hills I think and then we're going to go to Alabama and other places like that excellent big people big number of people from Alabama and Texas reached out wanting to see the film so you know it's it's fun to take it to places that typically my industry ignores because we have really interesting conversations and I I enjoy that well good luck with it I'm happy to do my part in um you know making people aware of it and I will have the relevant links to GoFundMe and the screenings in the uh description of the episode thank you so much man thanks for having me I appreciate it was a really good meeting you you too thanks that's it for this episode of conversations with Coleman guys as always thanks for watching and feel free to tell me what you think by reviewing the podcast commenting on social media or sending me an email to check out my other social media platforms click the cards you see on screen and don't forget to like share and subscribe see you next time [Music]

Channel: Coleman Hughes

Views: 12,174

Keywords: politics, news, politicalupdates, policies, currentaffairs, political, society, highsociety, modernsociety, contemporary, intellectualproperty, debate, intellect thoughts, opinion, public intellectual, intellect, dialogue, discourse, interview, motivational, speech, answers, Coleman Hughes, talkshow, talks, ethics, intelligence, discrimination, music, Meg Smaker, Filmmaker, CancelCulture, Jihad, Documentary, Jihadrehab, Theunderacted, MiddleEast

Id: QEeGrgmxKfI

Length: 84min 31sec (5071 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 20 2023