Meg Smaker’s Jihad Rehab is a problematic, surface-level and sensationalist look at the journey of former Guantanamo detainees through a rehabilitation center in Saudi Arabia.
The 2022 Sundance Film Festival has opened, and we are glad to be a part of it, from January 20th to 30th. Among the first World Premieres we have attended this year is Jihad Rehab, directed by Meg Smaker, which is presented in the US Documentary Competition.
Twenty years after the Guantanamo Bay detention camp was established by the U.S. military in the wake of 9/11, its legacy continues to cast a long shadow. Jihad Rehab focuses on several men — detained in Guantanamo for years without charge by the United States — after they are placed in what’s billed as the world’s first rehabilitation center for extremists. There, they undergo the center’s “deradicalization” program, which includes therapy sessions and life skills classes, before they are permitted to be released into an unfamiliar society where they will face new challenges. In the process, the four men illuminate their individual understanding of what the term “jihad” has meant in their own lives, and express the anguish and complexities of their personal journeys.
Yet, director Meg Smaker’s debut feature proves problematic on many levels. Despite the importance of the subject and the unique access she has to the characters, the filmmaker chooses to be the focal point of the film. She applies the presumption of guilt to those men who were incarcerated in Guantanamo as teenagers, and sets out to illustrate their humanity and how, in the end, they are just humans. Taking the US government at their word that those drained in Guantanamo are Al Qaeda members is factually incorrect and the director overindulges in this mistake. Against this background, she appears in the film as the heroic journalist who goes very close to those dangerous men, but who is willing to empathize with them. These are director Meg Smaker’s words, in her official statement: “As children we are told stories about good and evil: the good witch and the bad witch. The roles are very clear. The good witch is good because… she was just born that way. Same for the bad witch.” Her vision is clear, and for two hours she tries to show that the presumed terrorists are “normal people”. This is how she misses the point.
The director attempts to shoe-horn in her perspective. Artificially invigorating or emotional montages naively try to convince us that these people were terrorists, but they have changed, and that they are humans after all. The film pretends to chronicle the evolution of the characters who are going through the “deradicalization” program. But the only few glimpses of the program we get are farfetched lessons on how to depict their hatred in drawings, on how to look after their families once they are released from the center. We cannot witness any evolution. How can one buy the director’s message, who tries to push us to empathize and forgive the “terrorists”, when we know that these men were tortured for 15 years in Guantanamo? Are we supposed to believe that, if they were really “terrorists” and spent 15 years in Guantanamo, 12 months of drawing in a rehab center will be enough to make them start an altogether new life once they are released?
On top of that, the directing is chaotic. The film seems not to be confident in its ability to introduce us to its characters in an immersive way. Any scene that has a direct cinema potential ends up over cut, and anchored by artificially dramatic or emotional scores. Moreover, the film piles on unnecessary animated sequences and cheesy slow motion effects, instead of settling for the harshness and seriousness of its subject. The film’s appetite for sensationalism is palpable, and this is yet another aspect undermining the director’s credibility. Finally, on the ethical level again, meanwhile she is asked explicitly by one of the characters to stop filming because this might endanger his life, director Meg Smaker decides to include this sequence anyway, even dramatically scoring the scene…
All in all, Jihad Rehab’s ambition is to humanize, but still remain suspicious, of men who were captured as teenagers without charges, and tortured for 15 years in Guantanamo. Trying manufacture empathy and to show us that they are human is absolutely not the point.
Grade: 1/5.
