How an identity-politics-obsessed mob destroyed a young filmmaker’s documentary
At the beginning of director Meg Smaker’s documentary Jihad Rehab, we hear a former Guantanamo detainee saying, “Meg, can I tell you something?” Sure, a woman’s voice says. “In every story there is good and bad,” the man goes on in a gentle Saudi accent. “But . . . it’s a thin line. The American government did bad, bad, bad things against us. But at least I am honest with what I did.”
The voice belongs to a former al-Qaeda bomb-maker named “Khalid” who claims he was tortured by Americans at Guantanamo. In an extraordinary scene, he also admits to being deeply troubled by the people his bombs killed. He is one of five men profiled in Smaker’s film who say they went to Afghanistan to train at al-Qaeda’s al-Farouq training camp, outside Kandahar, and were detained by the U.S. military following the attacks of September 11. (Khalid is Saudi, but the other four men are Yemeni.) The men were flown to Guantanamo and detained without charges for years or decades before being released to a Saudi-run program dedicated to preparing former al-Qaeda members for civilian life.
Smaker speaks Arabic and spent around ten years, off and on, living in Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, and Yemen. That includes a stint training Yemenis in modern firefighting techniques, which was where she first heard about the Saudi program. Smaker says it took two years just to get permission from the Saudi government and then another three years of shooting to get enough material to make the film. (Smaker had a significant financial backer in Abigail Disney, a well-known supporter of women filmmakers, but had to invest much of her own savings as well.) The bin Salman regime, which seized power in 2018, shut down the project towards the end of principal shooting, but Smaker had gotten what she needed: hundreds of hours of extraordinarily candid and intimate conversations with four men who had been swept up in America’s “War on Terror.”
Two years of editing produced a film that stunned virtually everyone who saw it. Smaker’s combination of access to the men, compassion for what they had gone through, and willingness to ask tough questions about their violent pasts made her film unique. “EVERY sales agent that saw the film wanted to rep it,” Smaker told me by email. “EVERY PR firm who saw the film wanted to rep it. EVERY big festival we applied to, we got into, except Cannes and Berlin.”
After six years of hard work, Smaker was living out a filmmaker’s fantasy. She was selected to premiere her film at Sundance, which many consider to be the top independent-film festival in the world, and accepted screenings at a slew of other festivals, including South by Southwest. Because she would not be ready in time, she turned down the Toronto International Film Festival, but Thom Powers, the director, remained a strong advocate. So it was with enormous anticipation that Smaker and her team — spread between the Middle East, Europe, South America, and the United States — waited for Sundance’s announcement of the 2022 slate.
The big day arrived on December 9, 2021, and the announcement triggered an avalanche of congratulations and praise. One odd note stood out, though: An American-born filmmaker of South Asian descent named A. K. Sandhu posted on Facebook, “Congratulations on all the hard work, Meg. I didn’t know that some Muslim filmmakers felt hurt by the film title. . . . I hope it can be navigated with sensitivity.”
The note didn’t seem particularly ominous, but Smaker’s Yemeni executive producer still sent a polite response that said, in part, “As an Arab Muslim, I couldn’t be more proud of this work and have ZERO issues with the title. . . . Meg and her team worked closely with several respected Islamic Scholars making sure nothing in it would be offensive to our community.”
Sandhu’s comment wasn’t a random one-off, however; it was the opening probe of what quickly grew into a well -organized campaign to “deplatform” the film and thwart its release. Shortly after, Smaker’s phone began lighting up with increasingly strident and puzzling denunciations of her, her film, and the whole idea that a white filmmaker could presume to tackle such a subject. The race issue was raised on social media by numerous people involved in documentary film — though it has since been disavowed as a legitimate critique of the film. The “authorship” or “inclusion” principle, as this is known, insists that filmmakers share the ethnic and cultural identity of their subjects. According to these standards, not only are outsiders incapable of understanding the experiences of others, they don’t even have the right to try; to do otherwise would be to take an opportunity away from a better-qualified person of color. As a white American, Smaker would be wildly inappropriate for a film about the Muslim world.
The past dominance of Western society over virtually everyone else on the planet requires inclusion to be of paramount importance in the film industry. Exclusion, however — the ruling out of certain individuals because of race or ethnicity — is ethically more problematic. Pursued far enough, 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 sufficient. War correspondent John Hersey, for example, arrived in Japan shortly after the United States dropped two atomic bombs on the country. He was a white American, but he wrote a devastating account of the atrocity, Hiroshima, that complemented — and in no way precluded — later important works by Japanese writers. In fact, having both insider and outsider accounts might allow the fullest possible understanding of important events.
In recent years, activists in the film and publishing worlds have tried to create a kind of moral monopoly over certain topics by maintaining that no one can speak about injustice that they haven’t experienced. Such injustice, in fact, now seems to be as carefully guarded as a financial asset — which, in some ways, it is.
The authorship debate completely sidesteps important socioeconomic issues, however. Race and gender are not the only predictors of income potential and social status; class and education are as well. Ninety-five percent of independent filmmakers have college degrees, according to American University’s Center for Media and Social Impact, and almost half boast a master’s degree or higher. Forty-two percent of filmmakers say that they have worked on a film without any compensation for up to five years, and over half made less than $25,000 on their last film. If “lived experience” is vital to authenticity, why should educated people in the developed world who can seemingly work for free make films about the undereducated and the disempowered? Why should college graduates of any race tell the stories of people who have far less agency than they do?
Smaker, though white, falls into the minority of filmmakers who come from a working-class background. Her father was a firefighter, and Smaker enrolled in a fire academy in Northern California soon after high school. She got a job fighting wildland fires for the federal government and then shifted to a state firefighting job that allowed her to go to school part-time (she eventually got an undergraduate degree and a master’s in filmmaking). She was working as a firefighter when the attacks of 9/11 occurred, killing 343 firefighters in New York City. Hoping to understand more about the society that her country’s attackers were from, she quit her job and moved to Afghanistan. Smaker was taken in by a family in Balkh Province and protected from neighbors who wanted to punish her during the American bombing campaign. She was 20 years old.
One of the early critics of Smaker’s film was a Lebanese-American filmmaker named Jude Chehab, who had a brief conversation with Smaker at the Hot Springs Film Retreat in 2019. It was the first time that Smaker realized that her film might be controversial. “She hadn’t seen the film,” Smaker recalls, “but seemed unhappy that I — as a non-Muslim — was making a film about Muslims.” After she saw it, Chehab went on to write on the TRT World website: “The only perspective needed is the Muslim one. . . . When I, a practicing Muslim woman, say that this film is problematic, my voice should be stronger than a white woman saying that it isn’t.”
Strangely, the only film listed on Chehab’s website, I’m Free, Now You’re Free, is about an African-American woman who had been imprisoned in the United States. (Chehab did not respond to an email seeking comment but later said that her conversation with Smaker was about the title, “Jihad Rehab.”)
Despite contradictions and inconsistencies, filmmakers were electrified by the attacks on Smaker and quickly piled on. “And she’s gonna make millions when Apple or Amazon or Netflix buys that doc,” Mustafa Dustin Craun wrote on Twitter. “Who funds these films?” asked Violeta Ayala. “An entirely white team behind a film about Yemeni and South Arabian men, a very complex issue framed by white ppl . . .”
Many of the women attacking Smaker belonged to a well-connected advocacy group called the “Brown Girls Doc Mafia” (BGDM) and were anything but outliers; the authorship principle had already come to dominate the doc world. Originally a resource for the more prosaic needs of independent filmmakers, the Brown Girls Documentary Mafia has grown to almost 2,000 members — some in prominent positions throughout the industry. The group never attacked Jihad Rehab or acted in any kind of organized way for or against anyone; it simply provides crucial support, resources, and affiliations for filmmakers. But some of its members have very strong views on social justice. An opinion piece co-authored by BGDM member Sonya Childress that ran on the Independent Documentary Association (IDA) website described the entire industry as an essentially racist scam: “an entrenched culture of entitlement and imperialist impulse on the part of filmmakers [seeking] to tell the stories of communities that are not their own, advancing disempowering narratives about marginalized communities — and all for personal gain.”
That opinion did not prevent another industry titan, the Gotham Film and Media Institute, from reaching out to Smaker after the Sundance announcement to make sure she had included their logo in the credits because the film had gone through their filmmaker lab. Later, however, when institutes associated with the film were being called out on social media, Gotham issued a public apology for that same film. “This seems to be a pattern in our industry,” Smaker observed. “When you’re a rising star everyone wants to take credit for that rise, . . . but when you’re falling, it’s all on you, and you are alone.”
The title was a big point of criticism. “Jihad Rehab” was what the center was called when Smaker first heard about it in Yemen, but coming from her, it might sound flip. “Jihad” means struggle in Arabic — including a spiritual struggle — and critics have said that the association with violence is racist and disrespectful. (Smaker’s own subjects freely use the word to mean waging war to defend fellow Muslims.) And to many critics, the word “rehab” reeked of a presumption of guilt for men who had never been charged with crimes, possibly because they were tortured at CIA dark sites and at Guantanamo. (After Sundance, Smaker added several text cards to ensure that viewers understood what one of the detainees said about his unlawful detention. She also changed the film title to “The UnRedacted.”)
In fact, Smaker’s film is nothing less than a nearly two-hour indictment of America’s deeply shameful experiment with unlawful imprisonment. She makes abundantly clear that the subjects were held without trial and subjected to torture sessions that included waterboarding, beatings, and, allegedly, sexual assault by a female guard while a detainee was pinned to the ground by male guards. “Americans torture — they never tire of it,” one of the men tells Smaker. She apparently earned the trust of these four men because they all speak freely and honestly about things that many people consider to be crimes. (One man went on to say that he did not think 9/11 was a big deal until he saw people jumping to their deaths at the World Trade Center; then he experienced a terrible shame.) The earnestness of their conversation, the way they seem to search for the right words, and their occasional laughter or tears suggest subjects who were completely at ease with Smaker and what she was documenting. A fifth subject who was clearly not comfortable with it dropped out halfway through.
The attacks on the film escalated so quickly that within days Sundance started to waver. If anyone found it odd that the opinions of a handful of people — including several who had never made a film — were trumping the opinions of veteran festival programmers, they never said anything. Sundance director Tabitha Jackson, who also belonged to the Brown Girls Doc Mafia, was clearly caught between her professional responsibilities and rapid changes in the industry. (Jackson resigned from her position at Sundance shortly after the controversy took off.) Presumably with Jackson’s approval, Sundance sent Smaker an extremely aggressive list of questions about the film as well as six specific demands, including that she hire an outside firm to conduct an “accountability and ethics review.” (A representative from Sundance declined to comment on the record.) Sundance allowed her only a weekend and two business days to accomplish this, but she was able to engage a widely respected ethics consultant in the industry (who insisted on anonymity to avoid backlash). The consultant affirmed that Smaker had “met or exceeded standard industry protocols.”
Outsourcing the evaluation of a festival film is unheard-of, though, because it places an enormous burden on the filmmaker and preempts the festival’s own programmers. When Thom Powers, the Toronto festival director and a bit of a kingmaker in the business, found out about the outside evaluation, he fired off an email to Jackson that said in part:
I was dismayed to hear [from Meg Smaker] that there are opponents of the film who have apparently declined her openness to meet with them; and that rather than confronting her directly, they’re applying their pressure to Sundance and MPAC. . . . I worry about . . . expectations set by outsiders who have little insight into the filmmaking process, often haven’t seen the film in question, and haven’t taken the time to talk to the filmmakers. These self-appointed arbiters presume they have more knowledge of the risk factors than the film team that has spent years grappling with the details of the case. The proposition of an outside review board is a radical restructuring of how documentary filmmaking is practiced.
(Contacted by email, Powers declined to comment.)
Powers had invited Smaker to Toronto to show her film, so he was an important ally, and his letter was forceful in its defense of long-standing industry norms. But Sundance didn’t blink — it couldn’t afford to. Criticism of the film was hitting a critical mass at which the controversy was creating its own publicity. Festival reputations — and revenue — were now at stake. Smaker responded to the attacks by inviting her critics to screen the film and provide feedback before she locked picture, but they demurred. Smaker’s insistence that they sign a nondisclosure agreement — an industry norm for films that have not yet premiered — was cited as the deal-breaker.
One of the most frequent critics was a Canadian-born filmmaker of Lebanese descent named Amber Fares, who would tweet and retweet about the film 324 times in one month — an average of over ten times a day. Several of her social-media posts cited the “authorship issue” as deeply concerning. Fares, a member of the BGDM, also tracked down the film’s translator and wrote him that, from the outside, the film appeared to be “the typical bias war on terror story that conflates the word jihad with terrorism.” Fares went on to ask the translator what his own experience on the film had been. (Contacted by email, Fares declined to comment or confirm details for this article.)
The translator was exceedingly proud of the film and immediately notified Smaker of the contact, but he was an exception. Before the controversy, for example, film consultant Alexandria Bombach posted on Instagram, “This is one of the most important films I’ve ever worked on. Thank you for your trust, your vision, and your guts, Meg. You are the perfect person to be telling this story and I’m so f***ing proud of you never backing down. I’m in awe.” Now, however, she wrote, “I have not had any involvement in the crafting of this story and haven’t seen a cut in over two years. . . . I voiced serious concerns around the ethics of the film and the general approach of the story. . . . I was shocked that the film was accepted at Sundance.” (Bombach declined to respond to a message on her website seeking comment.)
More serious, however, was Abigail Disney’s reversal. The granddaughter of one of the founders of the Disney empire and a ubiquitous presence in the documentary world, Disney was a fierce advocate for the film — and a financial backer. After a screening session months before the Sundance announcement, Disney wrote Smaker, “This film is SOOOO good and SOOO gorgeously shot and SOOOO well edited that you must take in this one thing before you read on: WOW WOW WOW. You have made something great.”
After the film’s premiere in late January, Sundance posted a public letter apologizing for having “harmed” the filmmaking community, though it never specified what the harm was. Rave reviews started to pour in nevertheless, but in ways that just made things worse. Variety, IndieWire, and other industry stalwarts praised the film’s compassionate and intimate look at the lives of the former detainees, but rather than vindicate Smaker, the reviews seemed to prove that the entire industry was biased. A pressure campaign later forced several of these publications to change their stories to avoid using the word “terrorists.”
And it kept getting worse. A viewer must have taken photos of the end credits during the premiere, because one by one, people who had worked on the film were tracked down and accused of being Islamophobic. One person, who had done nothing but advise Smaker on how to get her hard drives through U.S. customs, was told that she would be publicly outed as Islamophobic if her name remained in the credits. Calls also went out to the composer, consultants, advisers, and even people in the special-thanks section of the credits. Shortly after, people started to ask that their names be removed. Finally, Disney buckled.
“First and foremost, I am truly sorry,” she posted in a public apology at the end of February. “A film I executive produced, Jihad Rehab, has landed like a truckload of hate on people whom I sincerely love and respect. I failed, failed, and absolutely failed to understand just how exhausted by and disgusted with the perpetual representation of Muslim men and women as terrorists or former terrorists or potential terrorists the Muslim people are.” (Contacted by email, Disney declined to comment.)
The odd thing was that most reviewers continued to see the exact opposite: a deeply empathic look at men who were almost completely powerless. Beautifully shot and edited, the film at times achieves a kind of transcendent truth about human folly — both Arab and American. Zaid Jilani, a Muslim writer, later wrote for the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism, “Many Americans will likely find it hard to stomach such a humanizing portrayal of men who, in one case, worked as terrorist bomb makers. It’s hard to shake the feeling that if I had directed this exact same film the exact same way, it would be getting little to no criticism from anyone.”
Support from reviewers and several Muslim writers failed to turn the tide, however, and Disney’s about-face coincided with a cascade of bad news for Smaker. South by Southwest disinvited her, distributors started to back out of talks, Powers rescinded his offer to consider her for Toronto, and 17 filmmakers issued another long public letter excoriating Sundance for the film. (A spokeswoman for critics of the film declined to speak on the record, but some of her views are represented here, here, and here.) Eleven of the signatories on the letter were BGDM members, and they were ultimately sending their letter to fellow member Tabitha Jackson. An accompanying petition denouncing the film was signed by over 200 filmmakers, many of whom had never seen the film because the festival had screened it only twice, to small audiences. Nevertheless, Sundance felt compelled to issue a second, much longer public letter that took great pains to list all the efforts Sundance was making to promote inclusion and equity. The issue of exclusion, however — whose work could be denounced by the film community, and why — was never addressed.
Smaker was now radioactive, and six years of work had gone down the drain. Her career was effectively destroyed. “The people in the industry who are powerful enough to help you are also the ones who have the most to lose,” Smaker explained. “So, they don’t dare stand up to pressure.” And then, when it seemed that things couldn’t get any worse, a London-based Islamist group named “CAGE” waded into the fight.
CAGE — the name is not an acronym — describes itself as an advocacy group for people who have been imprisoned during the War on Terror and takes the extraordinary position that none of the almost 800 men imprisoned at Guantanamo were associated with al-Qaeda. That includes Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind of 9/11. In July, CAGE released an open letter blasting Smaker for exploiting a “power asymmetry” with the imprisoned men and endangering their lives. The letter, which was signed by former Guantanamo detainees, claimed that they were in touch with two of the men featured in Smaker’s film. The men supposedly claimed to be unaware the film would be shown publicly and “strongly imparted” that doing so would put them and their families at risk. (When contacted by email with questions about their open letter, a CAGE spokesperson replied that a colleague would “most likely respond on his return from annual leave.”)
The accusation was rooted in the question of free consent: Even if the men signed release forms — which they did — they might have done so only because they were under the control of a “carceral system.” If that were true, though, it could be equally true that the men were forced to criticize the film and affirm the claims in CAGE’s letter. Either way, the idea that Smaker had coerced her subjects into cooperating and put them at risk became a doc-world trope that was impossible to disprove, because, by order of the Saudi state, the men were prohibited from communicating with anyone outside the country without permission. (Smaker says she interviewed over 150 residents, and only 30 agreed to collaborate — but most insisted on a disguised identity. Ultimately, five men signed consent forms to appear in the film undisguised, though one felt uncoerced enough to decide to drop out halfway through.) The men were also absolutely prohibited from communicating with anyone who had been at Guantanamo, which would immediately rule out CAGE, since it includes at least one former detainee. Smaker, who had already been cleared for contact, was in touch with three of the men throughout the months after Sundance. None of them ever brought up issues raised in the CAGE letter, and one even called recently to say — in a voicemail — that he missed her and wanted to know when she was coming back to Saudi Arabia for a visit.
The film makes clear that the penalty for violating the no-contact rule includes a possible return to prison. That raises the question of how CAGE members managed to communicate with Smaker’s subjects in the first place. Had they done so with Saudi-government knowledge and approval? If not, had they taken steps to protect the men from legal consequences? Either way, how reliable could these statements be if CAGE did not explain in their open letter how they obtained them?
Regardless, the CAGE letter provided an appearance of real-world legitimacy for critiques that were either subjective or based on false assumptions. No one had any idea whether CAGE’s claims about consent and danger were legitimate, but Smaker’s detractors now believed they had proof the film was tainted, and the circle was complete: A staunchly pacifist left-wing film community was sourcing information from a Salafist organization that had been credibly accused of going beyond prisoner advocacy to simply being apologists for terrorism. When video surfaced of British citizen Mohammed Emwazi cutting the head off American hostage James Foley in Syria, for example, CAGE was forced to acknowledge prior contact with him. But it went on to describe Emwazi as an “extremely gentle” and “beautiful” young man who had been radicalized by government harassment. CAGE has also expressed support for the Taliban despite its well-known practice of torturing and killing prisoners. Amnesty International, in fact, severed ties with CAGE because of its views.
In other words, CAGE is presumably not an organization that the gatekeepers of the documentary world want to make common cause with, but Disney, Powers, and the Sundance Institute seem to have fallen into a kind of cultural trap. The rhetoric around authorship is so tricky and loaded that it has become almost impossible to question, even for a person of color. Nadia Gill, a filmmaker and lawyer of Egyptian and Mexican descent, was one of the few people in her profession to take up Smaker’s offer to screen the film. Gill was distressed by how different online characterizations of the film were from the film itself. She wanted to write an opinion piece but decided not to, over worries about her professional future.
“This is why the spiral of silence occurs,” Gill says. “Even people like me are afraid to speak up. I care about equity but it’s not my only value. I have other values, like the search for truth and artistic expression. What’s true is not always what’s equitable, right? By the men’s own account, Meg’s film muddies the waters about who was really in Guantanamo. It’s much easier to criticize the War on Terror if you can say that everyone who was caught up in it was completely innocent.”
At its core, the identity argument maintains that only people from marginalized communities can tell the stories of those communities. There are many landmark documentaries that defy that premise, of course — Harlan County, U.S.A., about a coal-miners’ strike, was shot and directed by Barbara Kopple, whose father was a New York textile executive. But the subjects of her film are white, and the historical disgrace of slavery and racism may well require new, higher standards of inclusion that don’t necessarily address the disempowerment of poor white communities such as Harlan County.
A letter from a “BIPOC”-led (“black, indigenous, and person of color”–led) group called “Beyond Inclusion” lays it out very plainly for the Public Broadcasting Service, which has maintained an exclusive relationship with filmmaker Ken Burns for decades. Burns is a white man with 108 director credits to his name. “Your commitment to diversity at PBS is not borne out by the evidence,” the letter asserts. “When you program an 8-part series on Muhammad Ali by Ken Burns, what opportunity is there for a series or even a one-off film to be told by a Black storyteller who may have a decidedly different view?”
There is an important line between promoting filmmakers of color and canceling a specific white one, however. Had a great series about Muhammad Ali by a black filmmaker been in the offing, PBS might well have preferred it to the Burns proposal. The letter never mentions one, so it’s unclear whether the Burns project cost an actual BIPOC filmmaker a job. The critique of PBS contains a deeper and more important truth, though. As filmmaker Sonya Childress explained on the Firelight Media website: “When we use film to build empathy for marginalized groups, we normalize whiteness by confirming the notion that whiteness is the lens through which others are viewed, understood and judged. Instead of naming white supremacy, or the standardization of whiteness, the empathy model unintentionally reinforces it.”
Childress’s point about white privilege is a fair and legitimate one and deeply needed — not just in the documentary world, but in our entire society. But what Childress never addresses is financial privilege. A brown–white dichotomy ignores an equally important elite–non-elite dichotomy that sees many people of color in powerful positions and many white people in marginal ones. When privileged people of any color make films about disempowered and undereducated communities, as Barbara Kopple did, all the same questions apply. Can Kopple really understand the coal-miners’ plight? Did she take a job away from an aspiring filmmaker in that community? Did her subjects agree to be in her film, and were they later endangered by it?
To be radically inclusive, festivals such as Sundance would have to prioritize poor and undereducated filmmakers over elite ones with college degrees. But if they did that, the entire business might fall apart. Almost half of independent documentaries net no money at all, many lose money, and festivals such as Sundance, Toronto, and South by Southwest depend on a pool of people willing to work for little or no compensation to make the beautiful films that we all see. Kentucky coal miners make more money than most filmmakers — around $50,000 a year — but they’re from a population that cannot afford to gamble on whether they will ever get paid.
“The ethical issues raised throughout the controversy regarding danger and consent are important, but for me personally, not nearly enough hard evidence has come out to discredit Meg’s film,” explains filmmaker Nadia Gill. “If you duck under the hood of what happened to Meg you will find internal chaos at Sundance, at the International Documentary Association, and elsewhere in the documentary community. To see a giant power struggle laid bare at the expense of filmmakers . . . is enormously disheartening.”
Editor’s Note: This piece originally mistakenly identified Jude Chehab as foreign-born; in fact she is American-born.
— This article appears in the October 31, 2022, print edition of National Review.