Meg Smaker’s film, renamed “The UnRedacted,” was scrapped after its Sundance debut, but she’s not giving up.
The film, an in-depth look at five men who were imprisoned and tortured at Guantánamo after fighting for al-Qaeda and other extremist groups and then sent to Saudi Arabia for rehabilitation, drew a mind-blowing reaction at the Sundance Film Festival in January. .
Smaker had spent years getting permission from Saudi Arabia to make the film, and more years gaining the trust of the men in the film, four Yemenis and one Saudi. The documentary broke new ground by examining the reasons why these men were drawn to jihad and received good reviews. “This is a movie for intelligent people looking for have their preconceived notions questioned,” The Guardian wrote.
But on the eve of the festival, a number of Muslim filmmakers objected to the film for multiple reasons, most of them vague concerns about the safety of the men and whether they actually consented to being filmed, but notably including the fact that Smaker is a blonde-haired American woman and not from the Muslim community. Two Sundance Institute staff members resigned in protest, and a month after the festival, Sundance issued an apologysaying that “it is clear that the screening of this film hurt members of our community, in particular, people from the Muslim and MENASA communities, and we are deeply sorry.”
From then on, “Jihad Rehab” became toxic and politically untouchable. Financier Abigail Disney has distanced herself from a film she had previously enthusiastically endorsed. The dealers who had been hanging around before Sundance disappeared. And festival after festival that had invited Smaker, from SXSW to The Gotham, they suddenly pulled her and the film.
The filmmaker was crushed.
“What happened at Sundance was devastating,” Smaker said in a conversation last weekend at the Ojai Film Festival, one of only two festivals to have screened the film since Sundance (the other was in Atlanta). “Having institutions like Sundance and Gotham throw the film under the bus was just as devastating. As a first-time filmmaker, it was amazing to have the whole industry come after you, especially when 90% of the people complaining hadn’t seen the movie.”
But then a funny thing happened this fall. Smaker had continued to contact journalists (including this one) in the months after the film’s cancellation, insisting that what had happened to him was unfair, divorced from the facts, and a knee-jerk response to a handful of “wake-ups” (and possibly jealous) activists. I had a hard time understanding the objections to the film, except for the fact that the Muslim filmmakers would have preferred this story to be told by a Muslim. That’s a fair point of view, but hardly something Smaker can remedy. And hardly a reason to say the movie should never be seen.
And so “Jihad Rehab,” renamed “The UnRedacted” as Smaker hoped to quell objections to the film, became the ultimate sacrifice to cancel culture, this time from the left.
It was perhaps not surprising that anti-wake journalist Bari Weiss defended the film. But then, in quick succession this fall, leading publications published prominent reviews of the film’s cancellation. The New York Times ran a front page piece by Michael Powell, accompanied by a photo of Smaker in a heroic pose, highlighting the controversy and noting that the film had become a prisoner of identity politics.
“In the case of ‘Jihad Rehab,’ the critique of identity is wedded to the view that the film should function as political art and examine the historical and cultural oppressions that led to the imprisonment of these men at Guantanamo,” Powell wrote. “Some critics and documentarians say that this mandate is reductive and numbing.”
That would have been remarkable enough for a movie no one had seen, but then that article was followed by another article defending Smaker in The Atlantic by veteran Middle East journalist Graeme Wood. That piece dismantled, point by point, the various criticisms of the film. One of the criticisms was that the men interviewed did not give informed consent to be filmed or quoted, which Smaker had always refuted. (You can check those arguments here.) Wood’s headline was scathingly simple: “Cowardice at Sundance.”
And then Sebastian Junger, the veteran war correspondent who has covered the conflict in Afghanistan for a decade, stepped forward to offer a sound defense from the film in The National Review titled: “Inside the shameful cancellation of ‘Jihad Rehab’.”
“Exclusion…—the exclusion of certain individuals on the basis of race or ethnicity—is more ethically problematic,” he wrote, considering the issue. “Carried long enough, the exclusion would seem to rule out the entire practice of journalism. The premise of foreign reporting is that you don’t have to be Jewish to understand the Holocaust, black to understand civil rights, or dispossessed to understand ethnic cleansing; being human is enough.”
Most recently, author and podcaster Sam Harris invited Smaker to speak about the cancellation. The three hour conversation went viral and led to the creation of a GoFundMe Accountwhich by now has raised $736,000 in donations so that the filmmaker can distribute the film herself.
This is not a simple case of turning the tide in favor of Smaker: the pieces in the Times and National Review were followed by a lengthy article in the Guardian which explored issues of informed consent and Smaker’s dealings with detention center inmates. Filmmakers like Marjan Safinia, an Iranian director-producer and former chair of the board of directors of the International Documentary Association, continue to speak out against the film.
Still, following recent support, Smaker has now amassed a war fund to distribute the film and, yes, it’s cheeky, to qualify for Oscar consideration. What she has done.
“I am grateful that respected journalists like Michael Powell and Graeme Wood and Sebastian Junger have taken the deep dives and vindicated me and the film for the public. But the industry as a whole has been silent,” Smaker told me, still wounded. “My hope is that now that the film is Oscar-qualified and on the Academy’s website, people will see it for themselves.”
Basically broke (except for the GoFundMe windfall), Smaker has no team except her co-producer Stavroula Toska. She has no publicist, no agent, no manager. She is all alone.
And she’s not entirely apologetic either. When asked if she would have done something differently if she could, Smaker is adamant: “No,” she said. “I would not change anything.”
He changed the title, he said, to honor LA Times writer Lorraine Ali, who is a Muslim and has also defended the film, he said it reduced the complexity of the film to what seemed like a thoughtless catchphrase. “Lorraine Ali said the movie has nuances, but the title doesn’t,” Smaker said. “That made sense to me.”
It remains to be seen if in the highly competitive documentary race, voters in the documentary branch will take the time to watch Smaker’s film. As TheWrap awards executive editor Steve Pond has reported, there are 144 documentaries that have qualified for 15 spots on the shortlist.
The time is short. Smaker has edited a new trailer for her movie and, as she often does, she refuses to give up. “Maybe I’m doing it because people tell me I can’t,” she said. “I don’t like to reward bullying.”
And also, like most independent filmmakers, she’s a stubborn optimist.
“If you asked me four months ago if my film would be claimed on the front page of the New York Times, I would say ‘Probably not. But crazier things have happened,’” she said. “So if you ask me if it can be on the shortlist. I’d say, ‘Probably not, but crazier things have happened.’”
