Enkele weken terug ontstond er een controverse vanwege de Sundance Film Festival-selectie van Jihad Rehab. Die documentaire zou namelijk een eerder eenzijdig en gekleurd beeld schetsen van voormalige Guantanamo Bay-gevangenen.

Nu heeft een groep Amerikaanse moslimfilmmakers een open brief aan het Sundance Film Festival gestuurd, die we hieronder integraal in het Engels posten:

To the Sundance Institute Leadership:

What is the curatorial vision of the Sundance Film Festival? Who does the Sundance Film Festival serve? What are the guiding values of the Sundance Institute? And to whom is the Institute accountable?

We are a group of Muslim, and Middle Eastern, North African and South Asian (MENASA) filmmakers, supported by allies across the film, journalism, and human rights fields, writing to demand deeper conversation and, crucially, concrete steps towards more ethical curatorial practices at Sundance, in ways we hope will ripple throughout the industry. While concerns around these issues have most urgently coalesced around the recent programming of “Jihad Rehab,” a film that is both ethically flawed and devoid of critical context, the larger systemic questions raised above come from years of witnessing limited or problematic representations of Muslims and/or people from communities directly affected by Islamophobia.

The documentary feature film “Jihad Rehab” follows several former Guantánamo detainees who are released after over a decade under the condition that they partake in a mandatory terrorist rehabilitation program funded by the Saudi government. Yet the film never makes it explicit that they were illegally detained and held without charge, nor does it address questions around free consent in a carceral environment. Numerous articles and reviews have elaborated on the many other ethical failures of this film (see Additional Resources below).

By platforming “Jihad Rehab,” the Sundance Film Festival engaged in reckless programming that: (a) may have jeopardized the safety and security of the people in the film; (b) provided a platform for subpar journalistic ethics and standards; and c) reproduced bias against Muslims (and those perceived to be Muslim).

While some of the public discussion about “Jihad Rehab” has centered on the issue of authorship — and while it’s well understood that predatory reporting on the “War on Terror” has contributed to a culture of Islamophobia — this is not the principal or most egregious problem with this film. In fact, this issue pales in comparison to the serious ethical concerns the film brings up.

Since its world premiere at the Festival in January 2022, film critics at prominent publications including Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, and IndieWire, have written reviews of “Jihad Rehab” that describe the men in the film as “terrorists” and “jihadis”, or otherwise state that the men are guilty of terrorist acts. The truth is that the U.S. government detained the men unlawfully for well over a decade without charge or trial, and tortured them. It is well established that the vast majority of Guantánamo detainees were held unlawfully and without charge — this is evidenced by in-depth investigations from the United Nations, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Seton Hall Law, and the U.S. government. While some film critics eventually corrected the errors they had published, the number of critics who came away with this shockingly incorrect understanding after watching the film makes clear that “Jihad Rehab” presents a false narrative of guilt and criminality.

In addition, human rights experts and veteran intelligence analysts have publicly shared their serious concerns about the film’s errors and the danger it poses to the men featured in it. Yet these warnings have been met with little corrective action, care, or even acknowledgment.

As Letta Tayler of Human Rights Watch elucidated on Twitter, “Jihad Rehab” violates basic ethical documentary standards because the film “doesn’t venture into the concepts of informed consent or the unlawfulness of detention without charge.” As Tayler highlights, “Involuntary rehabilitation is only legal as a sentence following a conviction.” Additionally, former CIA analyst Gail Helt also noted on social media, “This film places these former detainees at risk […] If the filmmakers think this film will not get to people who could cause harm to these men, whose lives are hard enough without the publicity, well, that’s just another indicator that they were ill-equipped to tackle the subject matter of this film.”

Many experts on Guantánamo, including former Guantánamo detainees such as author and campaigner Mansoor Adayfi, have also reached out directly to the Festival and the “Jihad Rehab” filmmakers to share their concerns about the safety and security risks the film poses. Some are in touch with the families of the men profiled in the film. They have expressed alarm about the harm the film could cause, and question the free and continued consent of the men to participate or to appear in the final film, given the reality that they were held inside a carceral facility in Saudi Arabia, a country well known for its human rights abuses. These interventions point out that the documentary repeats allegations derived from torture. As Adayfi states in a letter to the “Jihad Rehab” filmmakers: “The documentary reproduces false narratives that were produced almost entirely from unreliable information obtained through our torture […] it is surprising and disappointing that your film chose to ignore the cumulative [evidence] that undermines the whole question of “rehabilitation” (because how can you rehabilitate someone from something they haven’t done?).”

Given these serious safety concerns, your public statement of February 18, 2022 falls far short of an appropriate response.

The programming of “Jihad Rehab” makes clear the lack of adequate ethics or accountability structures in place at the Sundance Film Festival. Many respected documentary filmmakers, as well as Sundance Institute’s own Documentary Film Program, Engagement & Advocacy, and Outreach & Inclusion staff expressed urgent concerns months before the Festival about the very real threats to the safety of the protagonists. Two of your department leaders resigned over this matter. It is clear how aware of these conversations you must have been internally. It bears underscoring that concerns about this film have been widely held in the documentary field for years (see the recent Documentary.org article “Why Filmmakers Have Had A Problem With ‘Jihad Rehab’ For Years”), and numerous documentary funders and producers noted for their adherence to journalistic practice passed on the film.

On October 8, 2021, presumably as the 2022 program was in the process of being determined, Sundance Film Festival leadership responded to criticism concerns about participant consent in the film Sabaya, selected for the World Documentary Competition for the 2021 Festival. Sabaya was also a film that featured Middle Eastern participants at a distinct power disadvantage to the filmmaker. In their letter, Sundance leadership wrote: “What the Sabaya reporting has made even more clear is the importance of a field-wide (including filmmakers, festivals, funders, foundations) dialogue around informed consent and, more broadly, how we can build the capacity to be “trauma-informed” when the circumstances call for it…. In addition, we must ensure that the wishes of those who are giving informed consent have agency in the recounting of their own experiences.” We ask of your leadership, who were actively making these statements in the same timeframe as selecting “Jihad Rehab,” what accountability do you take for your own statements?

When some of the authors of this letter met with Festival leadership on December 17, 2021, we asked if you would gather data for us about the Festival’s programming track record on films about Arabs, Muslims and the MENA region. In the absence of your response, we informally gathered some data of our own. We found that in the past 20 years of publicly listed programming, the Festival has programmed a total of 76 films in the U.S. and World Documentary Competitions about people that are Muslim, and/or people from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), or films set in those regions. Fewer than 35% of these films were directed by Muslim or MENA filmmakers, and when it comes to films about the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria — the predominant lens through which Muslims and Arabs have been depicted in the Festival’s documentary competitions — only 25% of these films were directed by Muslim or MENA filmmakers. Especially disappointing is the fact that over two decades, the Sundance Film Festival’s documentary competition strands have featured only four films about the Muslim experience in the United States: of those two are about the War on Terror.

Even after 20 years of War on Terror policies, including the use of torture, drone warfare, and the targeting of Muslim communities through discriminatory policies such as surveillance and travel bans, your most recent programming choice, “Jihad Rehab,” recycles harmful and Islamophobic narratives. Sundance’s curatorial vision shapes cinema culture and, in turn, public opinion. These misrepresentations contribute to real harm upon members of these communities, real harm that we and our families have personally experienced, and continue to personally experience. The prioritization of narratives focused on terrorism and war also has the effect of strangling space for the work of Muslim, and/or MENASA filmmakers to tell stories outside of these violent frames and from their own positionalities. It is time for the industry at large to reckon with the unexamined Islamophobia that has allowed these biased frameworks to thrive for so long.

Thus, we, the undersigned, are calling for the Sundance Film Festival to publicly acknowledge and make amends for its part in perpetuating the above harm, and to take swift, documentable, and publicly shareable measures to correct these oversights in your Festival programming process. In the absence of your taking genuine steps toward accountability and transparency, we suggest the following:

A clear public statement from the Institute admitting fault, the necessary and first step in taking accountability.

The formulation and design of a revamped Festival curatorial practice, which should include: clear definitions for the circumstances under which a film may be removed from the Festival program, before or after its public announcement; and a clear conflict of interest policy for Festival programmers. If scientific, legal, human rights or other expertise and context is required to evaluate a film, we ask that these resources be sought and applied.
Mandatory training on, and implementation of, safety and security protocols and documentary ethics for all Institute and Festival staff before the opening of the submissions window to the 2023 Festival.
Mandatory anti-Islamophobia training alongside existing anti-racism initiatives for all Institute staff.
A documented commitment by the Festival leadership to a clear set of accountability, ethics, anti-racism and equity frameworks and tangible processes for diversifying your screeners, reviewers, programmers, implementing external accountability partners (with particular emphasis on increased Muslim, Middle Eastern, South Asian and African representation) and drawing from tools which have been developed by the Documentary Accountability Working Group, the DART Center, Doc Society’s Safe + Secure and others.

A recommitment to promises made in your public statement in 2020 in light of the Black Lives Matter uprisings, including your commitment to transparency by annually sharing the demographics of all Festival screeners, reviewers, and programmers and public reporting on this annually.

Publication of data on all films programmed at the Sundance Film Festival about people that are Muslim, and/or people from the Middle East and North Africa, or films set in those regions over the Festival’s history since 1985. This data should include the films’ descriptions as well as the identities of their makers.

Our call is not related to just one film, nor one organization. We ask our filmmaking community, funders, buyers, programmers, critics, broadcasters, distributors, and sales agents to hold themselves accountable regarding films that risk the lives of others. Several funders and film organizations participated in supporting this film along its journey to a Sundance premiere. With a few notable exceptions, most have now quietly distanced themselves from the project, or removed all trace of the film from their websites. While we focus here on Sundance, these other organizations know who they are. If we are to believe that discourse is the path through moments like this in our field, then that burden has to be carried by those gatekeepers with the most power.

These demands are intended to be comprehensive and equitable, in order to compel the many gatekeepers who enabled this harm to begin to repair it, as well as to mitigate the possibility of similarly damaging events in the future. We value the Sundance Institute, and therefore these demands are meant to be constructive, in order to begin to rebuild trust between Sundance and its artist and audience community. Accountability cannot be imposed, it must be chosen by the perpetrators of harm. The choice to practice accountability is yours.

Sincerely,

Amber Fares, Filmmaker, “Speed Sisters”, Sundance Grantee, Sundance Momentum Fellow, Sundance Edit and Story Labs, Catalyst Fellow, Sundance Women in Film Finance + Strategy Intensive, Film Forward

Assia Boundaoui, Filmmaker, “The Feeling of Being Watched”, Sundance Grantee and Festival Alum

Farihah Zaman, Filmmaker, “Ghosts of Sugar Land”, Sundance Festival Alum, Documentary Film Program Grantee & Fellow, Creative Producing Summit Alum. Director of Grants and Programs, Brown Girls Doc Mafia.

Jude Chehab, Filmmaker, “Q”, Sundance Documentary Film Program Grantee

Khaula Malik, Filmmaker, “How The Air Feels”, “There Was Nobody Here We Knew”

Malika Zouhali-Worrall, Filmmaker, “Thank You For Playing”, Sundance Momentum Fellow, Adobe Women at Sundance Fellow, Sundance DFP grantee

Marjan Safinia, Filmmaker, “And She Could Be Next”, Sundance Documentary Film Program & Luminate Fund Grantee, Catalyst Fellow

Nausheen Dadabhoy, “An Act of Worship”, Sundance Documentary Film Program Grantee

Rabab Haj Yahya, Editor, “Speed Sisters”, Sundance Documentary Edit and Story Lab Fellow

Razi Jafri, Filmmaker, “Hamtramck, USA”, Sundance Producing Lab and Fellowship, Sundance Institute Knight Fellow

Sami Khan, Filmmaker, “The Last Out”, Sundance Documentary Film Program Grantee, Sundance Documentary Creative Producing Lab Fellow

Samia Khan, Filmmaker, “Accidental Activist”

Senain Kheshgi, Filmmaker, “Project Kashmir”, “Divas of Karachi”, Sundance Documentary Film Program Grantee & Editing, Composing, Producing Labs Fellow

Smriti Mundhra, Filmmaker, “St. Louis Superman”, Sundance Film Festival Alum

Sura Mallouh, Filmmaker, Sundance Grantee

Talal Jabari, Cinematographer, “Naila and the Uprising”

Zeshawn Ali, Filmmaker, “Two Gods”, Sundance Music and Sound Design Lab Alum

With the support of:

Joanna Natasegara, Filmmaker, “The Edge of Democracy”, Sundance Festival Alum

Sonia Kennebeck, Filmmaker, “Enemies of the State”, Sundance Documentary Film Program Grantee

Abby Sun, Curator, The DocYard

Abu Bakar Khan, Producer, “The Lost Empire”

Ahmed Mansour, Director, “Brooklyn Insahllah”