Making Sense with Sam Harris - #300 — A Tale of Cancellation

Episode Date: October 12, 2022

Sam Harris speaks with Meg Smaker about the controversy around her documentary, "The Unredacted (Jihad Rehab)." They discuss her background as a firefighter; the effect that 9/11 had on the firefighting community; her subsequent adventures in Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia; the deprogramming of jihadists; the organized campaign to silence her film; the capitulations Sundance, SXSW, and other festivals; and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.   Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.

Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Well, there's been a lot of chatter online about Ukraine that is new. Many people are concerned that we could be edging closer to nuclear war with Russia. Anyway, I reacted to some of that online, but I think I'll do a podcast on Ukraine in the next couple of weeks. Today's episode is a tale of cancellation. For anyone who has any doubts about whether cancellation is a thing, this episode is for you. In particular, it's a tale of a truly ridiculous cancellation, as you'll hear the mob pick the wrong target, as it often does.

Today I'm speaking with Meg Smaker. Meg is a documentarian with a very interesting and unusual backstory. In the first half hour or so, you'll get a sense of just how intrepid and resilient a person she is. There's been some important coverage of her and her story. Michael Powell wrote a good piece for the New York Times. I believe Graham Wood might be doing something for the Atlantic. But what there's been much more of is noise on social media among the whinging hysterics and malcontents and grievance entrepreneurs. Briefly, what happened is that Meg made a film, originally titled Jihad Rehab, about a program in Saudi Arabia that seeks to rehabilitate former terrorists.

And her film was accepted at the best film festivals, like Sundance and South by Southwest, and then it was hurled from the ramparts of those festivals, which is to say disinvited. She even had an award rescinded and positive reviews changed after the fact, all in response to an utterly dishonest campaign of defamation and intimidation. So this is a story of what happens when a creative person has her dream come true, because for a documentarian to get her first feature into Sundance is a truly wonderful thing. Her first feature in The Sundance is a truly wonderful thing. It more or less guarantees distribution and future work as a filmmaker.

But it's also a story of what happens when that dream is maliciously turned into a nightmare by the woke mob. As you might expect, this bothers me for many reasons. First, it hits close to home. This is the kind of thing that has been directed at me. But when it was, I was lucky enough to have already built a platform and an audience that makes me more or less impervious to these kinds of attacks. Meg wasn't so lucky. But as you'll hear, the injustice of this episode is really compounded because Meg is absolutely the wrong target. I mean, I can understand many people being upset by what I have to say about Islam. Because my view really is condemning of the faith, at least in part.

Obviously, I don't think I or anyone else should be cancelled for honestly discussing the link between specific doctrines in Islam and much of the pointless misery we see leaking out of the Muslim world, jihadism especially, although we might currently note what's happening in Iran with social protests bordering on revolution in defiance of the hijab. social protests bordering on revolution in defiance of the hijab. But this is just to say that in my case, the offense and even outrage isn't totally surprising and illogical, right? Because my view really is that Islam has to be dragged, kicking and screaming, if need be, into the modern world. But in Meg's case, there is literally nothing in her film for people on the left to honestly find offensive. She doesn't share my view of Islam at all, and there's no

criticism of the religion in the film. As I make clear in our conversation, this is an utterly humanizing portrait of men who we we have every reason to believe, have been treated terribly in Guantanamo by the U.S. government. So, what's happened to Meg in her film is quite perverse. It's just a spectacular own goal for the far left, and it's perfectly emblematic of the moral and political confusion that is screwing up everything now. And as you'll hear at the end of the podcast, there's also a call to action here. Meg is still struggling to get her film distributed,

and she has set up a GoFundMe page for that purpose, which is accessible at jihadrehab.com. which is accessible at jihadrehab.com. And I would really love it if our community could help Meg. So if you find this story compelling and you want to help right the wrong that was done here, I would greatly appreciate it. And now I bring you Meg Smaker. I am here with Meg Smaker. Meg, thanks for joining me. Thank you. I'm really nervous, but Melissa Chen put you on my radar, and I'm glad she did because it's a fascinating situation you're in.

I'm sure it's an uncomfortable one, but I want to get into it, and it pulls together so many issues that we're dealing with collectively and culturally. and culturally. There are several things to talk about. You've made a film originally titled Jihad Rehab, which I've seen, and which is really quite wonderful. And the irony of its cancellation will be quite evident to our audience. So we want to talk about the film and its reception, perhaps above all. But before we do, you have a very interesting and counterintuitive background. So let's just summarize who you've been before you ever thought you might make documentaries, and then we'll get into the film and the current controversy. I don't know how far back you want to go, but I want to go back at least as far as September 11th. Yeah. Well, I'm currently a

filmmaker, but before I'm a documentary filmmaker, journalist, but before I was a filmmaker, I was a firefighter. And if you asked me back then what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, without hesitation, I would have said be a firefighter. I mean, I love that job. Every day was different. You got to work in a team and it was just such a really, really great job to have. And the people that I worked with were like family to me. All that kind of changed though on 9-11. And the reason for that is, but like the day before 9-11, I would describe my firehouse as a place of like family of like supportive caring people who you know were very yeah they're just like family a place of love and support right and within 24 hours that place

turned from a place of love and support into a into a place that had a lot of like vitriol and hatred and and bigotry and none of the things that i was seeing on mainstream media kind of answered those questions of that like that were generated from that day and my dad always told me that there's only three types of people in the world right those that when you hit them they hit you right back and those when you hit them they run away and those when you hit them they asked why'd you hit me and I've kind of always been in that third camp so after 9-11 my initial response was to try to like understand so I watched a lot of news and I read a lot of books about Islam and I read um you know some books about Arabic and the history of the Middle East and what was really interesting to me was the things that

I was reading about Islam were directly contradicting what I was seeing on the news. And the only way that I can think of at that time was to basically go to Afghanistan on my own and try to find those answers for myself. And so it was a little bit after six months, around six months after 9-11, I traveled to Afghanistan on my own. And after arriving there, I was immediately humbled by my own ignorance of the world. I mean, I don't know if you remember what you were like when you were 21, but I was very self-assured of my worldview. And that came crashing down after my time in Afghanistan. Okay, but before we get into your experience

there, there's a bridge we have to attempt to build. I don't know if it's possible because it could be mysterious even to you, but you have just described your sudden interest in why they hate us, which was shared by many, many millions of people in our society at that point. And your response to it is so peculiar and extreme compared to what everyone else did, that if there is an explanation for it, it would be great to have it insofar as you can provide it. have it insofar as you can provide it. How is it that you, a solitary woman who happens to be a firefighter, suddenly decides to go to Afghanistan solo in the more or less immediate aftermath

and ongoing chaos of the beginning of our war on terror? Basically you're saying, why did you do this crazy thing of going to Afghanistan right when we started this war on terror. Basically you're saying, why did you do this like crazy thing of going to Afghanistan right when we started this war on terror? It is fairly bonkers if you just, if you look at the average. I will completely admit to that. If you don't know me, it sounds like a fucking crazy person who does some shit like that. Sorry. Am I allowed to swear? You are. Yes. Okay, cool, cool, cool. That makes this a lot easier for me. Yeah, I think, how do I put this? So I remember when I was a firefighter, for me, I loved doing it. But there was one call,

there was one type of call that whenever we went on it, I would always be really nervous about it. And that was any calls involving hazardous materials. Because every video we saw in training where firefighters died, it was because some kind of chemical or gas asphyxiation or something like that. And so it always kind of scared me, right? And it was the only calls that I went on that I would hesitate. And it was the only calls that I went on that I would second guess myself. And I don't know how you're wired. But for me, when I don't understand something, like I didn't really understand how chemicals and hazardous materials work, it scared me. And so for me, diving deep into that and understanding it is a way of kind of like a safety blanket. So when I realized that this was one part of me being a firefighter that I just needed to overcome that fear, I went in and I started training

as a hazmat specialist. And it's really like involves a lot of chemistry, a lot of like, you know, on the firegrounds work type drills and stuff like that. And it's a pretty involved process to become a hazmat specialist. But then after I got that, the next call that I went on, that was for a hazmat call. I didn't hesitate. I was super comfortable and super deliberate. And I think for me, it might kind of, my friend thinks it's a little bit obsessive compulsive, but like, if I don't understand a thing, like I have to understand the thing. Like I can't let it go. I can't be just like, oh, that's going to be a mystery and I'm just going to keep on living my life. Does that make sense at all? Yeah. Although there are many, many things to understand. And on paper, at that point, it must have looked, if not to you, to others, fairly crazy. Yeah, batshit crazy is what my dad said.

Yeah, because literally we have journalists, you know, seasoned journalists getting decapitated at that point. I mean, you know, Daniel Pearl got murdered, I think, in February of 2002. Yeah, I was, yeah, I was, I actually had a knock-on effect of that is when I went back to Pakistan, I was going to Afghanistan. So I went back to Afghanistan. I went to Afghanistan right after 9-11. And then I went to back to Afghanistan in 2004. And when I went back, I actually had the secret police. They weren't so secret, actually, because I knew they followed me in Pakistan because they were they were worried that I was going to get kidnapped. And it was funny because I wasn't there as a journalist

who had loads of resources. So I was staying in the really cheap part of town, which also was the very dodgy part of town. And when they found that out, they were really scared that something was going to happen. And they sent this like caravan of like armored cars to literally remove me. And they like put me up in the Marriott. It's like, what is going on guys? And I think the Marriott was bombed shortly after that. So I don't know if that was the best decision, but yeah, I think that, listen, I, my experience has been that most of the people that I meet are good people. And that goes for every country I've been to, I think through different cultures and different traditions and, you know, religions, it's most of the people I've met have been good. I think if I had never left the United

States and I didn't have that experience, I would feel very fearful of the world because I know that before I started traveling and before I started really doing a lot of reading ferociously, the world seemed very scary because imagine if you never left your hometown and you just, you know, watch the news all day. That's fucking terrifying. And I think when I, the way that I describe Yemen and Afghanistan to people, because inevitably they always think that it's so dangerous and there's explosions going off all the time. And then I'm like, you know, running for my life. But the way I describe it to people is imagine that you knew absolutely nothing about the United States. You didn't know it was located on a map. You didn't know who the president was. You had never seen any

movies from there. The only thing that you knew about the U.S. was what you read in the New York Times and about like the rapes and the robberies and the killings. what you read in the New York times and about like the rapes and the robberies and the killings. And you would think that America was like Mad Max on crack. And you'd be like, that place is dangerous. I'm fucking never going there. And I feel like a lot of the times like living in Yemen,

most of my friends and family were like, and then initially they were super scared for me. But you know, when you live in a country like that, or, you know, even know even going to Israel or other countries that I've been to that are portrayed on the news in kind of like this hectic chaotic way I think the majority of the population the majority of the time does not experience that yes there are you know explosions here and there of like violence but you also have like school shootings here like i remember when i was in saudi arabia at a taxi driver he asked me where i'm from and i told him america and his

first thing was like oh it's so sad about your crazy schools over there like you must be so worried for your children going to school and i was like i don't have kids but yeah i think that's something that people do think about but it's interesting that that's our view of the states over there. So yeah. Yeah. Sorry, I ramble on a lot. Just tell me to shut the fuck up if I go on too long. Sorry.

No, it's great. So Yemen, obviously there's a significant civil war and humanitarian crisis happening there now. Was any of that going on when you were there or is that pre-chaos? I mean, well, it really kicked off in, so the Houthis have been, were definitely an issue when I was there. Like there was bombings in the outside of the city. Ali Abdullah Saleh, who was the president at the time, it was a definite issue there and we had lockdowns sometimes when things really kicked off and and there was riots sometimes for I remember this one time it's one of my like so when you live in Yemen you have to have clan

and what I mean by that is when I move there as a single person, I would like move into an apartment. And then this happened to me a handful of times. I'd move into an apartment and then I would like repaint it and redo everything and make it nice. And then inevitably my landlord would come a couple months down the line to check the place out. And then he'd be like, oh, it really looks nice in here. I was like, yeah, thank you. And then about a month later, he's like, I've decided to move back in and I'd have to move out. And I realized after a while that I just had no recourse to any of this. And then I met, there's a huge diaspora of Iraq, Iraqis in, in Yemen because of what happened with the war in Iraq. A lot of Iraqis moved to Yemen to kind of get away from that and escape that at the time. And I'm

what met and befriended this family. And they kind of took me in and adopted me. And one of the, one of the women, I consider her like a sister to me. She actually helped me on the film and did some translations and looked at, gave some story notes, but yeah, she's like, she's like a sister to me. And so when they adopted me, the next time I got messed with, the whole crew came down. And we're not talking about two or three people. We're talking aunts, uncles, cousins. And then as soon as it was clear that I had clan, that I had people, I was left alone. And then they found me this place to rent in Hadda, which is the newer part of Sana'a. And it was this really old Gabili guy. Sorry. Gabili is a Bedouin with a lot of money

from selling Kat, which is a drug there. And he was a huge fan of mine because I was always put the rent on time, really, really low maintenance. And when the riots kicked off, this is very Yemen, when the riots kicked off, he sent two Hilux trucks with Toyota Hilux trucks with each of them had a 50 caliber gun in the back and right outside my gate to like protect me and then he dropped off an ak-47 for me to have just in case just in case and i was like oh i love yemen it's this hospitality it's great yeah well yeah i'm seeing the hospitality although the the safety is looking questionable at this point well it's you know what i like i said it's if i was by myself at that time and I didn't have a clan, I didn't have a very well-known and influential, powerful ghibli as a landlord, I would be like, yeah, it's very dangerous. Okay, here's how I describe it, right?

I don't know about you, but I like puzzles. Not puzzles as in like I put together puzzle pieces. That shit drives me nuts. But actual like human culture cultural and and political puzzles and so for example it was 2004 and so growing up my dad was a firefighter but he he had this knack of like he loved to read he read a lot of textbooks um in his spare time that was one of the things that I picked up from him. And so I was reading about laissez-faire economies. And it was this theory, and they'd really never been in practice. But at that time, because of the collapse of the Somali state,

I was like, this would be a really cool thing to go find out about. Because technically, this is a laissez-faire economy. There's no government, there's no rule of law. find out about because technically this is a laissez-faire economy. There's no government, there's no rule of law. So I was in Northern Somalia, Somaliland, and I was trying to figure out how I could go to Mogadishu because Mogadishu at that time was absolutely chaotic. And if you can picture Mogadishu as a pizza, each slice of pizza is a different clan or different like faction rules. And you can't cross over that without permission. If you do, you can,

you'll, you'll be shot and killed. So I was trying to figure out, cause I wanted to basically be able to go all over Mogadishu freely. And I was trying to figure out how to do that. And I realized that in Mogadishu, they had, you know, marble cigarettes and Coca-Cola and other kind of products. And it occurred to me that they have to get that from somewhere because there's no factories that make that kind of stuff at that time anyway in Somalia or Mogadishu. or Mogadishu. So even though the Somali state collapsed in 1991, that means, and as did the post office, that means someone has picked up some kind of and made a private postal business.

And my theory was that if I can befriend that guy, that would be the person who would be able to get me free access. Because even if you're a warlord, if you're running a piracy ring, you need to have your supplies, right? You need to have for your men, for your family. You don't want to get cut off. And that's the one guy no one wants to piss off. It's the guy who brings you that stuff. So I found out who ran the private postal service in Somalia. I met with him, I befriended him, and then I went to Mogadishu with him. And when we walked around, everyone saw me with him and just figured that I was his friend or that we were, you know, I was doing a business deal with him. And then once he left, I was able to go all around Mogadishu and no one messed with me. And

it was like pretty night and day. And it was just figuring out the puzzle of this place and how you're able to navigate it. So I guess the answer to your question is yes, going to Mogadishu as a six foot tall albino Godzilla on the surface is not smart, nor is it safe, but it's all how you do it. And by doing it that way, it actually was quite, quite safe. Does that make sense? Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think you've just further confirmed that I want to be with you in a crisis if I have to be in a crisis. I'm on a lot of people's like top list for if the zombie apocalypse actually comes. I was really

disappointed because I honestly thought that when this all started, I was expecting like Mad Max Fury Road. I'm like, man, I'm going to rock in this new world. I got this great skill set. And then it wound up being like the big Lebowski apocalypse. We're all home in our robes. So I didn't get to use my skill set, unfortunately. Yeah, kind of went stir crazy, actually.

So how long were you in Yemen? A little bit under four, five years. So like a little, a little bit over four and a half years. Yeah. And was Somalia just a, did it punctuate that time or did you go to Somalia after Yemen? So Somalia, I went in twice, once when I was in Yemen. And then again, when I went back to school, I wrote a paper based on my time in Somalia called The Advantages of Anarchy. And I turned it into one of my professors. And the paper basically said that Somalia was in this unique position because Somaliland

had declared itself independent, but it had its own currency. It has elections and president, but it was not recognized by the international community. And because it wasn't recognized, it wasn't able to get money from the IMF and things like that, which on the outside people thought was a bad thing. But what actually happened was, because they didn't have international recognition, they also didn't have international influence. And so the government didn't go abroad for money. It had to go to the local populace and the local business leaders. And so it created a very healthy relationship between the local business and the politicians where it was more organic and they were responsible to the local populace where a lot of countries in Africa receive a lot of their budgets and funding from the IMF. And so they're okay pissing off the locals because people that they don't want to piss off are these foreigners in these foreign countries. So it actually created a very healthy economy and a very healthy political system in the North in Somaliland.

And so the paper that I wrote was kind of like about the advantages of the anarchy that happened in Somalia. And I turned it to my professor and she called me into her office. And I thought I was in trouble because, I mean, you don't know this about me, but I have a learning disability and my spelling is a fucking atrocious, like really bad. So I thought I was going to get in trouble. And so she called me in and she said, you know, I read your paper and I was wondering if you would be interested in writing an academic article about it. And I, you know, we could co-author it. And I didn't know what it took to write an academic article. it and I you know we could co-author it and I didn't know what it took to write an academic article I thought it was gonna be like a couple weeks of my time so I was like sure it like took two years so then I applied for some grants to go

back to Somalia and actually do real field field research and so then I went back in 2010 and went all over Somalia, kind of doing field research on state building and piracy and using piracy as a way to measure stability and state building. Fascinating. Sorry. Again, just tell me to shut the fuck up. I go on a diet all the time. This is all great. But I do want to get to the present uh concern so so you i guess one more step along the way so you're you have created this still by my lights

fairly insane cultural exchange program for yourself and it's all working out you've gone to you've spent years in yemen uh you've had adventures in somalia at what point do you decide to become a documentarian? That actually happened while I was living in Yemen so when I was in Yemen I was teaching fire I was the head instructor at a firefighting academy so I taught Yemeni men how to fight fire

and which that's a whole different story how I got that job that's I don't know if you know this but women aren't firefighters in Yemen. I can imagine. I remember my first day, I walked into the classroom, and they didn't know I spoke Arabic. I walked in the classroom, and I could hear them whispering,

and they thought I was the secretary for the instructor. And I started writing on the board, and they're like, wait a minute, this is our instructor? And they completely ignored me, like completely. And that you must have been in many situations where people assumed you could not understand Arabic and they're talking about you in front of you. And then you disabuse them. I love I love that. I absolutely I love it. Because I mean, I don't look like yeah, I don't look like I would. You don't look like you speak Arabic.

But that for you so first day i literally went home i was almost crying because i thought oh my god i'm gonna get fired from this job and then the second day the same thing happened and so you know firefighting we have this saying like improvise adapt and overcome and it's something that we just kind of go to all the time and uh when you become a firefighter the your fire academy is about 20 weeks long it's probably more than that in some cases and you do all this classroom work where you study fire science and safety equipment and you know you know standard protocol and you know chain of command all that stuff before you ever do live field drills and what i mean by that is

we have something called the burn building when you're training and it's a house that basically you can set on fire multiple times to kind of do live fire drills, but you wait until the very end to do that. So what I decided to do was to take them, because I figured that they looked at me and didn't see me as a firefighter and that they just thought I was this woman to teach them stuff. And I knew that I had to change that perception. So on day three, I took them out to the fire ground and we did a live fire drill. And I taught them what an SCBA is. It's a self-contained breathe apparatus that firefighters use. And I taught them about how to don it. And my goal that day was to teach them

skip breathing. Skip breathing is a very advanced technique that firefighters use that when your air runs out, this alarm bell goes off and it basically tells you you have like a couple of minutes left of air. And you, if you're an experienced firefighter, you change your method of breathing that you make that last longer, but you have to remain calm. And you have this huge alarm going off in your ear. It's really, really, really hot all around you. There's fire, there's smoke. And unless you have a lot of experience and a lot of training, you tend to freak out when that alarm bell goes off and you suck your air down even faster. And I knew that. So there's all these cadets and I took them in two by two to the burn building and I would

shut off my air and shut off their air. And then the alarm would sound. And to the person, they all freaked out. This one guy tried to pull off his mask and I had to slam his body against the wall, like on his mask and yell at him in Arabic. I'm like, if you take this off, you will breathe in superheated air and you will die. So don't do that. And then this one guy he like

almost passed out and i had to basically drag him out of the building and then we did that and it was about like i think i had about 40 cadets and they all went in two by two and at the very end of it i came out and they're like all on the ground like breathing really heavily and this one guy looks at me he goes teacher you are a man and then after that that was it it was it was fine and we got along great and they just looked at me as like a man dressed as a woman teaching them firefighting and that was fine that was the end of it and so yeah it's definitely not the first time that that has happened but i do think that like being able to understand kind of where people are coming from like these men i think most of them had around a third grade education because firefighting is very different

in yemen it's not seen as a desirable job so you know people aren't people who have really well educated aren't aren't going after that and so a lot of them were from the rural areas and this was a huge thing for them and so it's like, you know, there's people who are maliciously sexist and there's people who just have not been exposed to women in different positions like that. And so once you're able to show them like, hey, like I can do this, I'm actually pretty good at it. It shifts their paradigm. And then we were able to work no problem. it shifts their paradigm and then we were able to work no problem. One more firefighting question that just occurred to me because 9-11 was an atrocity when viewed from one angle, certainly a tragedy when viewed from another and it was especially so, I can imagine, from the point

of view of a firefighter. What happened to the firefighters in New York that day and the heroism on display and the doomed nature of it was so acute. I have to imagine that these events hit the firefighting community generally in an especially hard way. I think you alluded to some of that when you talked about how riven your firehouse was with hatred of Islam, perhaps, or at least jihadism at a minimum. Is there more that you can say about that? I mean, how did this land for firefighters? So in California, we have a fire season and back in the day, it used to be actual season, not year round. And we have these things called strike teams where during fire season,

when there's huge fires, there are five engines that are sent out by different departments and to as resource allocations. And so I was on a strike team. So I was on a different unit. And that morning, we were at a station that had another engine on it. So sometimes stations have two or three engines that are stationed there. And that engine had been out the whole entire night running calls. And my guys, I was a senior firefighter at the time, and my guys got up early and started to get ready. And there was making a lot of commotion in the TV room.

And I was in the bathroom and I came out to actually yell at them because I was like, hey, the other crew's still sleeping, like keep it down. So I walked in the TV room and I kind of gave it to one of the firefighters and he pointed the tv and i and i saw one of the trade towers on fire and i turned to him was like i don't fucking care what movie you're watching because i thought it was i literally thought it was a movie because i didn't i had just i just thought they were watching a movie or something he's like, this is the news. And I looked at it. And the one thing that I remember most of that day was the shift. And when the first plane hit at the firehouse, it was more like, oh, shit, like, that's going to be a crazy call.

Because normally you have either a plane crash that you go on or like a high-rise fire that you go on but that was like two so we all as firefighters we were all talking about how what kind of call that would kind of be on how crazy it would go go to do something like that and what you have to understand is before 9-11 all the training that we got was that steel reinforced buildings don't collapse yeah so when you went to a high rise fire, you set your incident command system at the bottom floor, right? So we knew there's loads of resources and loads of firefighters and chiefs

always were gonna be at the bottom floor. And so we knew that. And so when the first plane hit, it was the shift that I'm talking about is like, it was more like thoughts and prayers and concerns and talks about how to be blunt, how cool of a call that would, that would be to go on.

Right. Like how cool would it be to plane crash into a high rise? And like, we were all talking about kind of being jealous of, of that going on a call like that. And then there was a palpable shift when the second plane hit, because it was very clear when the first plane hit, we thought it was some kind of accident. And when the second plane hit, the shift was so palpable because it went from concern and

thoughts and prayers to rage and vengeance. And it was interesting to me because the facts were the same. Plane hit at the building, people had died, and it was tragic. Those facts were the same, but because the perceived intent had shifted from accident to this is an attack, this is on purpose, that shifted the whole paradigm at the firehouse and so that to me is one of the things that i remember so vividly from that day and also that and then when the towers came down everyone in the firehouse was silent because we all knew where all the firefighters were because the incidents command system was had to be on the bottom floor and so we knew that probably before the rest of the nation did that hundreds of firefighters had died and so the the um the reaction was so firefighting is not like

normal jobs it's not like you go to an office and you just do a nine to five with someone it really is like an extended family and so i trained with guys in my department i trained with guys from fdny i trained with guys from louisiana because i was i did a lot of search and rescue training and and usar training which is like when the oklahoma city building exploded they'll send a usar team and it's basically i think it's 72 firefighters who are trained in different things, hazmats, low angle rescue, confined space, different specialties, and they'll send a team to that site to manage it. And so you get to train with other departments. And it's, I think it's also like a, like when even when I was traveling in Pakistan,

I brought some shirts from my firehouse with me. And I actually stayed at a firehouse in Pakistan, I brought some shirts from my firehouse with me. And I actually stayed at a firehouse in Pakistan, and I gave them some firefighting shirts. And it was, yeah, they just welcomed me in. They were very curious about women firefighting in America, but it is an extended family that actually goes beyond the borders of the US. And it's just a different kind of profession because the way I describe it is it's a very unique job when you're exposed constantly to other people's like most traumatic moments and it attracts a certain person and it kind of develops a certain personality to where when you meet another firefighter there's this kind of look of like yeah you know you've been through the shit you've seen it all does that make sense yeah yeah yeah so so there really was no expectation

on your part when you saw the fires burning out of control in in both towers that the buildings themselves were going to start to pancake and come down oh no absolutely not that's the thing like absolutely not because that's not what we're taught. Like, literally, it was when they started to collapse, it was shock. Because, you know, I, I was not stationed in a place with high rises. But I knew firefighters who were. And part of the training that you do is setting up on that ground floor for your incident command system. And so like, and again again they would part of firefighting is you have to learn about building construction you have to learn about hazardous materials you have to learn about medical stuff like it's a pretty great job if you're a person who gets bored easily because there's always new stuff to learn about but yeah we all the building construction training that we had it was like steel reinforced buildings don't collapse yeah and then that was the golden rule. And then they did.

And then the whole world kind of shifted. Yeah. Well, in defense of our erroneous assumptions, no one had ever flown a fully fueled passenger jet into a high rise. This is true. Jet fuel burns really hot and hot enough to melt those kind of steel reinforced beams no matter how thick they were. So yeah, it was something that hadn't been tested before. Yeah. Well, you'll get a few emails from 9-11 truthers after this. Can I just tell you this? In the Middle East, there's a lot of conspiracy theories.

That's just part of the... There's a lot of conspiracy theories also around 9-11. And almost to a person, people that I talked to in Saudi Arabia all thought 9-11 was an inside job either done by the Israelis or done by the United States as an excuse to go to war. And I remember there was, there was a guy that I'd met there, really nice guy, Abdullah,

who would, I would classify super conservative, very, very religious, but salt of the earth, fucking good human, just a great human being. And,

uh, he would, he was adamant. He was adamant that it was like an inside job and America did it and XYZ. And I remember he acted as my driver sometimes and I went to go interview Khalid, you know, the guy who opens the film, the bomb maker. His interview was 10 hours long. He was just such a fascinating person. And he was with Osama bin Laden on 9-11. And so we talked a lot about that and his experience. And Abdullah was in the room for part of the interview.

And that part, it was about Khalid talking about 9-11 and the attacks and being with Osama bin Laden and the plan and all the other stuff. And I remember leaving that interview and I got in the car with Abdullah. attacks and being with osama bin laden and the plan and all the other stuff and i remember leaving that interview and i got in the car with abdullah and this is from the horse's mouth the guy that was next to osama bin laden on 9-11 telling how it done i took credit for it yeah i was like abdullah like after hearing that 10-hour interview like have you changed your mind about this being an inside job and he's like you know make yeah i think uh i think maybe maybe you were right and i was like yeah it only took like 10 hours like a self-advocate's best friend telling you this so i was like okay but yeah that

was that was pretty funny you just have to do that a few million more times yeah and uh change opinion yeah right yeah i think you know colin my hope someday is to take his interview and do like a podcast of it. Cause his interview was just amazing. Like for example, there was so much that couldn't go in the film, but I was talking to call it about just small talk and asked him, you know, do you,

do you, I'm a documentary filmmaker. Do you ever watch documentaries? He's like, yeah, I watch a lot. I was like, Oh,

what's your favorite one? And he said, Oh, it's the one that was on the syllabus at Al Farouk. I'm like, wait a minute, you guys had a syllabus at the Al Qaeda training camp that had documentaries that were assigned watching material? He's like, yeah. I was like, well, what's your favorite documentary? And I was kind of wracking my brain. I think what would, what would Al Qaeda assign for homework for these, these, these guys in training? He said, yo, my favorite one was the one about the man. He's always looking in the camera and he's talking about the war in Vietnam. And I was like, wait, fog of war by Errol Morris. And he was like, yeah, he's like, we watched that film and we know all we need to know about America. I was like, this is crazy. Someday I want to tell Errol Morris that his movie was on the syllabus for an Al Qaeda training camp. That was great.

I would bet they've got a few Michael Moore films, too. Yeah, yeah. Okay, so let's jump in. We're just going all over the place. I apologize. I see the through line. It's working. So you are steeped in the culture at this point, and you have decided to make a film which sends you to Saudi Arabia. Perhaps you want to say how you got pointed in that direction and heard about this, the phenomenon of jihad rehab. But perhaps you can

just briefly summarize the film. I want to talk about the film, but I really want to talk about what has happened since the release or attempted release of the film. Because therein some powerful ironies await us. So what is jihad rehab, the place, the phenomenon? And give me the elevator summary of the film you made. Yeah, so I'll take those in reverse. So Jihad Rehab, now retitled The Unredacted, is about a group of men who, after spending 15 years in Guantanamo are sent to the world's first rehabilitation center for terrorists, which are located in Saudi Arabia. I first heard about the center way before I was a filmmaker. I was living in Yemen and I was teaching firefighting and I kind of overheard a conversation from some of my cadets and they were talking about a terrorist

attack that had taken place in Saudi Arabia. I think it was around 2007. And they said that the perpetrators had been caught and that half the perpetrators were Saudi and half the perpetrators and the other half was Yemeni. And that the Yemenis had been tortured and killed, but the Saudis had been sent to something that they referred to as jihad rehab. And at the time, this was really interesting to me because Saudi Arabia was and also is not known for its human rights record or for being very progressive. And so it always kind of

perplexed me why this very conservative country was running some kind of progressive rehab program for terrorists. And it always kind of stuck with me. And then my last film I made in Cuba, and my Spanish is not great. And when it came time to do my next project, I wanted to do something where it was going to be easier because I spoke the language. It was so hard to make this film. Yeah. And so I originally wanted to do this and I didn't know the kind of access I could get. I was pretty sure I could get enough access to at least do a short documentary. That was definitely within my, I was pretty sure I could get enough access to at least do a short documentary. That was definitely within my, I think, powers.

But I wasn't sure if I was going to have enough access or the kind of access that I wanted to do a feature length doc. But it took me like a year to get access, at least the kind of access that I have to make this film. Like full transparency, there are reporters that visit the center before me, but they're given like a two-hour PowerPoint presentation, and then they're shown around. And then they're really, really kind of escorted everywhere and very curated. And they might be able to talk to maybe one or two people there, but the kind of access that I was asking for, they had just never given ever. Right. I think I can't remember. Is it the same place that Graham Wood, the Atlantic writer went to when he interviewed MBS? Yeah. So he, full disclosure, I listened to his podcast with you and actually it's the only reason why I really wanted to hear

that full interview. So I paid for your subscription for that month just to listen to that. And then I had to actually stop my subscription that same month because when you get canceled like I did, you're really poor. So even though I loved your podcast with Graham, I was like, I can't afford to keep on doing this. Well, I've got some connections over here. Let me hook you up with a subscription. Yeah, can you talk to the person in charge?

You know, I listened to that. It was really, it was really great. Yeah. So I spent some time at El Jair, which I think Graham talked about in his podcast. And I spent obviously a lot of time at the center. So just to give you some context here, I interviewed or talked with, I would say around probably over 150 of these guys of that 150 around 30 were interested in doing the project of that 30 only 12 were interested in doing the project without their face being blurred or disguised in some way and for me it was really imperative for the audience to be able to see these guys and look them in the eye because i think that's how you kind of are able to like see someone's humanity but yeah yeah so and they were, were they all Yemeni in the end or were three of the four Yemeni?

So in the film you have Khalid and he's Saudi and then Abu Ghanim, Ali, Muhammad and Nader are all Yemeni. Right. Right. Yeah. Okay. So you make this film, which I've seen and which few other people have seen given what happened upon its premiere. Let me say, maybe I'll just say this

at the outset. I mean, just to set people up for, to understand what you saw the film, like what, when you, before you saw it, you heard about it. What did you think you were gonna, what did you, what were your expectations before you watched the film? insane its reception was. What you've produced in this film, apart from it being just a very professional and well-done documentary, and this is the kind of thing you'd expect to see on Frontline or Netflix or any place that would- Hint, hint, hint, distributors. Yes. But it's just a remarkably compassionate and humanizing document, right? I mean,ophobia would want people like me to see, right? I mean, it's literally impossible to watch this film and not have serious misgivings about

how we've conducted our side of the war on terror and serious misgivings about Guantanamo, for instance. And I mean, you totally humanize these guys. And if anything, I could imagine the concern for criticism going into this would have been that you'd be worried you were perceived as being soft on terrorism, or just taken in by the humanity of these guys and not really getting the nature of the evil we had to deal with and still have to deal with out in the world. So you would imagine, if anything, you could imagine some criticism from the right or from even someone like me. I mean, I'm not a creature of the right at all, but I'm someone who, like you, 9-11 had an instantaneous impact on me, but the direction I took it is

a real focus on the problem of jihadism. And that focus is often misunderstood. It's not at all unanimous against Muslims generally as people, and it's certainly not any symptom of xenophobia on my part. And I'm not at all surprised at the humanizing story you're able to tell in this film. I mean, my problem with jihadism is that, and just with bad contagious ideas generally, is that, you know, bad ideas get good people to do bad and otherwise unthinkable things. It's the bad idea problem that I'm most worried about, and jihadism is one species of very bad ideas that has religious roots. But it's not the whole story. And again, watching your film, what comes through very clearly is the rest of the story, right? So you see these guys as truly ordinary men who are faced with various life challenges, like, you know, earning a living and getting married or, you know, how to get married, right? How to even get a woman's attention. And you see this quite standard set of social problems

and you see the way in which, you know, jihadism can capture that and leverage that. And, you know, ideology and religious belief aside, you see other variables there. And that really is your focus in the film. So the irony, and again, we're going to talk about what happened once you made this film, the irony is, this is, you know, from my view, this is like, it's almost the perfect rejoinder or would should be. I mean, again, it's not a true rejoinder because, you know, I don't reject anything in your film, but it should be perceived as the perfect rejoinder to everything I've said about Islam and jihadism, right?

It's like, it is the thing you should want me to see if you hate what I've said. Yeah, I honestly thought you wouldn't like the film. I mean, again, I don't listen to your podcast religiously because I'm poor, but the few things that I have, you know, seen the clips online and stuff, I was like, oh, I'm sure intellectually I think that you would have been fascinated by it, but I was prepared for you to be like, I watched your film, Meg, and I didn't like it and hear all the things I think you did.

I should be the person who should be criticizing you for this film. And certainly anyone to the right of me, that's where you would think it would come from. Yeah. And honestly, we, I say we, I always say we,

I should say me more often. Um, but, um, I thought and believed that this film was going to be atrociously attacked by the alt-right. And because of that, I took a lot of steps, both pre, during, and post-production, to buttress up against those. What I mean by that is I knew that if, like, so typically when you make a film and it's in most of the films in English,

but there are places where it's Arabic, you hire like a translator to the initial ones and then you hire one translator to go in at the very end and make sure and spot check and make sure everything's on the up and up. Because I knew that this film was going to be just ripped apart, we didn't hire one or two. We hired three

different translators to go through the entire film before we picture locked to make sure that every single word that was in there was correctly translated. Because I thought that if something was off or wrong, that they would use that one thing to say, see, this isn't right. And therefore the whole film isn't right. And so I went through the film with a fine tooth comb and as did our lawyers. And we have this law firm called Donaldson Califf. And there you never heard of them, but they are the top lawyers for documentary films. Like they've represented all the Oscar award winners going back like 10, 15 years. And they're really well-respected. And they went through the film and they kind of was like yeah you kind of like went way above and beyond what you really needed to do to clear

this film like yeah because we're gonna get ripped apart once this thing gets out there and um i just you know i am also an ex an ex competitive boxer and so i'll use that metaphor and i was expecting the the right hook and i hook and I wasn't prepared for the left cross, you know? So therein lies the problem. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So what happened and what did the left cross actually look like? Well, I mean, before we get into that, I want to back up because you mentioned something about these guys and their motivations. And I will say, I wanted just to add to that because, you know, like I said, I interviewed over 150 of these guys and their motivations. And I will say, I wanted just to add to that because, you know, like I said, I interviewed over 150 of these guys and some of the interviews

lasted 10 minutes. Some of them lasted like call it up to 10 hours. And after a while, I began to see this pattern of that. They would fall into one of four categories, not all of them. There was exceptions, but like one of four categories in terms of how they got into this lifestyle or this world. And I think what was really interesting to me was that of the four, there was only one that actually had to do with religion

and the other three had nothing to do with religion. So when you were talking about like jihadism, this like bad idea thing, I actually, that wasn't a universality from the people that I talked to. And again, I only, I only talked to like, you know, I didn't talk to thousands of them, but it was, you know, a little bit less than 200. Right. And so also I should just know you have performed a kind of psychological experiment in making this film. And what you got is the very definition of a self-selecting group of people who were willing to talk to you, right? Oh, yeah. Well, I will say that the people that were willing to talk to me... So let's back up.

So how I got access originally, and the reason why I was able to talk to so many of them was... So when you operate in a regime, a dictatorship, be it Yemen with Ali Abdullah Saleh, or, you know, anytime that there's an authoritative regime, going through official channels is always, in my opinion, kind of the worst thing to do. The way to get access in those kind of places is by building relationships and back channels and whatnot. So like I said before, it took me a year to get access. And part of that was building relationships with people who were influential and who had friends in powerful places. And the one thing you have to understand about Saudi Arabia and other dictatorships is they'll never tell you no, but that what they will do is they'll throw hurdle after hurdle after hurdle after hurdle in front of you until you kind of just give up. And there are a lot of things that I'm not good at. I'm a horrible

speller. I'm very, very bad when it comes to like directions, but I got tenacity for days. So it was, I was up for that challenge. So we'd been going back and forth for about a year. And I remember at one point they said, you know what, we went to the prison and we went to the rehab center and none of the men want to talk to you. So that's the end of it. I said, well, why don't you let me just, just let me talk. Let me just go to the rehab center and to the prison and talk to these guys. And they were really reluctant to do that. And so we were going back and forth for a long time. And so finally, I was able to put enough pressure on the right people to where they acquiesced. They said, OK, we will let you physically enter the prison and the rehab center with one caveat. And here's where the hurdle comes

in. They said, you're not allowed to film one frame of video unless these guys agree from the jump to be part of your project. Meaning I couldn't spend months trying to get to know them and make them comfortable with me. They had to like agree from day one, which they knew was never going to fucking happen. Because a lot of these guys were either fresh off the plane from Guantanamo, where my country had just tortured them for a long period of time, or they were like fresh, like for back from Syria and fighting with and fighting in ISIS. And so, and they were right. When I first, they, so they let me in the center and they let me in El Hair. And when I sat down with the first batch of people, there was the older AlQaeda guys. And I started talking in Arabic and they wouldn't even acknowledge my presence. They wouldn't even like answer any of my questions. Some of them wouldn't even look me in the eye. And then I went to the next group, which was like the younger ISIS guys.

And same thing there. But what had serendipitously happened was that was also the same time that Saudi Arabia took its first batch of non-Saudi nationals through the program. And they just happened to be from Yemen. And I learned Arabic in Yemen, so I have a very thick Yemeni accent when I want to. And so I went in and there was nine of them and I sat down and I started speaking and their heads popped up and they're like why the fuck do you speak our mother tongue they didn't say fuck but I'm going to add that for dramatic flair and I told them I used to live in Yemen and they want to know how long and where I lived and I so I live in the old city um near the sila and they want to know like oh like the near that is

a very famous fasa restaurant down there and I was like like, yeah, best fasa in all of, all the old city. And we, we just had this immediate rapport because they hadn't been back to their home country in over 15 years. And so we just started talking and we talked for hours. And then at the end of it, I said, I would really love to talk to you guys more individually about your stories and learn about, you know, who you are and as people and, you know, would anyone here be willing to speak with me individually, and a couple hands went up. And then I met with those guys, individually, and then kind of word spread throughout the rehab

center that like Meg wasn't a journalist, because I didn't really ask him where the bodies were buried in the beginning. It was more like, you know, tell me about your childhood, like tell me about like your favorite sports teams is very benign stuff initially because i knew i was there for the the long haul which is great one of the things i love about being a documentary filmmaker is you're given like the time and the space and the grace to explore a story where i feel if i was a journalist on assignment i'd have to ask those hard questions from the jump because i'd only be there for a week or two. So yeah, word spread around the rehab center and throughout like the staff that, you know, Meg was like basically a white Yemeni, that's what I was told. And so I

was able to talk to a lot of the guys that initially wouldn't talk to me. And even though a lot of those guys didn't want to be part of the project, with the exception of a handful of people El Hire who just would not meet with me at all. It was pretty, it was self-selecting for the project, but I think I spoke to most people and I don't know. I mean, I would say I probably spoke to, maybe there was like, I'd say 10 to 15 people that I met that absolutely wanted nothing to do with me. But other than that, I was able to talk to quite a few people. But getting back to the original thing, after talking to all those people, and yeah, it is self-selecting in a way, I started to notice a pattern. And so it came down to like

four different motivations. And that's why there's four different characters in the film. So the first one, and I think this is the one that most Americans are familiar with, is the cause, right? Like, I see Muslims being persecuted or being oppressed, and I want to go and defend them. And it's my religious duty, right? And so that's like Abu Ghannam, where he talks about going to Bosnia when he first got into this to go defend Muslims in Bosnia. So that's the one I think most Americans are familiar with. But the other three have nothing to do with religion. So the next one is economic necessity, right? Like you have someone like Nader who was, he says in the movie- Just to be clear, I would put a 0.1 cause ahead of that first cause? Because I mean, there are many jihadists,

they may pay some lip service to defending their fellow Muslims, but in many cases, that's not even the rationale. It is much more about paradise. I mean, literally, we've got people who dropped out of medical school in London to go fight for ISIS and they're fighting other Muslims for ISIS. I mean, it's got nothing to do with saving the Bosnians who were left. Yeah. But I mean, that's an interpretation of the cause, right? So like I spoke to a lot of men who do subscribe to a certain ideology, right? And so it's like, unless you're this specific type of muslim this salafi type of muslim who describes to this these certain rules and ways of living then you're not a real muslim right and in their mind if you're not a real muslim then you're like an infidel and you can

be targeted and so i think that's that's definitely an ideology part of it for sure but it's still like them thinking they're doing the just and right thing and it's a cause like so it it's just a different version of like where it's one where you know i would gone and went to bosnia because that's what he thought his religious duty was where i'm sure the guy you're talking about in london thought his religious duty was to go and join isis and and do that that stuff there does make sense? I put those in the same category. Okay, yeah, I didn't mean to derail you. So the second one that I found a lot of men talk about was economic necessity, right?

So in the film, you have Nader saying that his life was hard before and that he needed money. And I think the exact quote is, you know, you want money, you need money, you go do the jihad. And in his mind, it became a way to make an income. And it became a career for him because he did this for a really long time. He started out, I think, when he was 16. And I think he was doing it till he was in his late 20s, early 30s. And so that's motivation number two. Motivation number three would be pure pressure,

right? So your family's into it, your friends are into it. That's Ali, right? His brother was really high up in Al-Qaeda. And in the Middle East, your older siblings or your fathers are very influential in terms of your life trajectory and your path and your decisions. And so Ali went to Afghanistan to an Al-Qaeda training camp because his brother was an instructor there and told him that he should go there. And Ali didn't really want to, but he was just like, you know, he's my older brother. I got to do what he says because that's the respectful thing to do. And then the last one, the fourth motivation that i found was more age dependent more of the younger guys and that was sense of adventure right so that's muhammad he said you know i was i was i didn't want to i didn't want to go to school i thought it was boring i didn't want to work

this guy offered me a free ticket to go shoot rockets in afghanistan like heck yeah that's i mean you're 19 years old you want to blow some shit up? Cool. Travel. Awesome. And I think that what was really interesting to me is when I realized that, I also realized that I had a lot of friends in the military and I'd heard similar motivations from them. I got a lot of friends who joined up for the military after 9-11. That's the cause. They're like, we want to join up, we want to defend our country. So that's cause number one. I have a lot of friends who, you know, sometimes

the best job in the state is with the military, you know, economic necessity. That's job number two. A lot of friends who come from military families. And, you know, that's just what their family does. That's motivation number three. And then a lot of my friends who joined up who don't come from money, but wanted to, you know, see the world and travel and have those adventures, join the military. And that's, you know, number four. And a lot of people who join the military to go to school, right, as well. So it's kind of a monetary incentive. And what I realized after a while, talking to the guys, it wasn't never really about good and evil. It was more about time and

circumstance. And even though, I will say almost university, a lot of these men were younger, and they were searching for purpose, and they were searching for belonging. And that also played a big role as well. But I think those four motivations are the reason why we have four different characters in the film, because they all represent the nuance and the complexity of this thing. And so I think when people talk about terrorism and they equate it to Islam, I think that, and just strictly religion, I think that's a misrepresentation of the actual, at least my experience in interviewing these guys. Does that make sense? like me, for Islamophobia, should want me to contemplate a document of the sort you have produced, right? I mean, you have produced nothing like an echo of any of my diatribes about Islam and jihadism and my specific criticisms of belief in paradise and what work that does for suicide bombers and

terrorists and in certain contexts. And so it's just, it's none of that, right? And yet you have been attacked explicitly as an Islamophobe upon the release of this film. So that's, and I think there's probably, you know, perhaps you know more about this than I do, but I think it's a fairly organized campaign of, you know, counter PR against your film. And it's, it has worked. Oh, yeah, it goes way beyond that. Like, there's things that you see in public, but there's private stuff. So there's been lawyers that were hired to send threatening letters. There's been lawyers that were hired to send threatening letters.

They're like, like just the, we got initially got loads, universally positive reviews from all the major trades like the Hollywood Reporter and IndieWire. And then right after that, this group sent letters to all the places that gave us positive reviews and threatening lawsuits. And then subsequently, a lot of those publications changed the wording of their reviews which i thought was quite shocking wow but yeah so it was a very coordinated you know like i just want to be clear on something here i think that whenever you make a piece of work be it a book or a movie and you put it out into the public space being criticized is part of that process. And I think that is a good thing. I think criticism is something that is helpful for dialogue and also sometimes can make

you a better writer or a better filmmaker. However, I differentiate between criticizing a piece of work and orchestrating an actual attack to take it down. And there's difference between tweeting, I don't like this film, and then hiring lawyers to try to scare people off the project or scare buyers off and or harassing people online. Like, so for example, Sundance announced the lineup of the documentaries on December 9th, and the film would have its world premiere on January 22nd. This is 2021 into 2022? Yes, correct. So the announcement was around the 9th, but the attack started on the 10th. So the attack started way before anyone had actually seen the film.

Right. the attack started way before anyone had actually seen the film. Right. And initially, if we're being completely honest here, initially the amount of like rage and anger that was directed at a film that no one had seen and a filmmaker that no one really knew. I think a lot of people, their initial response would have been to either attack back

or been like, you know, you haven't even seen my film, so screw you. But that was not my initial response. I actually, in the beginning, but this is before I found out some information later, but at the beginning, I actually understood it. And here's why. When I was a firefighter, I went on a call once where this kid had been seriously injured and would probably lose his hand. And when we showed up on scene, the mom was crying and the kid was bleeding out. And the father, he was fucking pissed. We showed up and he was just like, where the fuck have you been? You're so incompetent. What's taking so long? And he had this anger and rage that was directed at us to the extent that I looked at my captain like, are we safe? Is this guy going to come after us

physically? So we got the kid bandaged up and packed him up in the ambulance. And right after the family was out of earshot, one of the other firefighters said, that guy's lucky I didn't fucking deck him. And my captain, because he's older and wiser, turned around with this is about to be a teachable moment look on his face. He said, listen, what you have to understand is that in this job, you are interacting with people at the most traumatic moment of their lives. And trauma is a very tricky thing. People respond very, very differently, he said. And it's very unpredictable. Some people cry, some people laugh, and some people get angry. And that guy, even though he was angry at you, it is not about you. That guy doesn't know you. He's never met you before, but he has just seen his kid seriously injured and probably maimed. And the way that he's dealing with that traumatic moment is through rage. And even though he's yelling at you,

even though he seems like he's just has this rage towards you. You have to understand that has nothing to do with you. And so when the film, when we started getting the attacks before anyone had ever seen the film, initially I thought like, Oh, this makes sense to me because number one, what you have to understand is like every other film before this film that kind of talks about terrorism

is very sensationalistic, is very kind of fear mongering. And so if I was a documentary filmmaker and a Muslim, and I saw that Sundance had programmed a film about terrorism done by this white lady, who's not a Muslim, I would think too that like, oh, like not another one of these, these films, right? And so also because like my sister who I told you about that kind of adopted me in Yemen, she now lives in the States and in Texas. And we talk quite a bit and she's told me over the years about her experience in this country, being a Muslim woman who wears the hijab. And so, for example, she landed in America from Yemen when she moved here.

So she was living in Iraq and then we fucked up Iraq and she moved to Yemen and then Yemen went to shit and then she moved here. She was born in the States, but she grew up in Iraq. And so she came here

and she said that she went through customs and immigration and she took three steps out of the airport. And she was three steps into America. And someone walked up to her and spit in her face and told her to go back to where she fucking came from. And that was her introduction to this country. And so over the years, I've talked with her about her experience. And I have a lot of friends who are Muslim. I'm really close with my executive producer, Muhammad. He's Yemeni Muslim. And we've talked about his experiences as well. of people mistake muhammad he said for for being mexican so he's like i can pass as mexican sometimes it's better but i think that like knowing the amount of just i don't want to say tacit bigotry that they have to kind of experience on a pretty regular basis like post 9-11 muslims were treated very differently in this country and i think unless

you're in that culture or you have really close friends who are in that culture you're unaware of the toll that takes like for example imagine being a person where everywhere you go, you're treated with suspicion or you're treated in a way that is different than the other people around you. Or you're having to deal with things like stepping out of the airport and just being spit on. I mean, that is not one incident. That's over years and over 20 years of experiencing that in this country, that causes somewhat of a traumatic effect, right? So that is in itself, I guess, a type of trauma to endure that over two decades. And so when this originally happened, because that amount of rage was directed at a film that no one had seen, it reminded me of that call where even though the rage was directed at a film that no one had seen it reminded me of that call where even even though

the rage was directed at me and at the film because no one had seen it yet or met me i kind of figured oh this is not about me or my film this is about the trauma that these people have been through for the last 20 years and the assumption that this film is going to add to that and be years. And the assumption that this film is going to add to that and add to the problem of the stereotypes that are propagated in this country about Muslims and about Islam. And so it was really interesting. So the imam that helped us on the film, he told me that when he was first told about the film, his first response was like, ugh, not another one of these films about Islam and terrorism and jihad. And then he said, once he saw it, though, he goes, Meg, if you're going to watch any film about terrorism, this is the one people need to watch. And I was like, thank you. And so he

actually went from being very skeptical of the film to then coming on as kind of a consultant and helping us with some stuff in the film and still is a really big champion of it for today and he's really well respected a mom and he actually studied in saudi arabia as well so he knew a lot about the kind of stuff that we had to do to make the film get it done in saudi arabia funny enough his brother was also a firefighter on 9-11 but because of the bigotry that he faced post 9-11. He actually left the fire service. So we had a lot in common. It was a really interesting conversation.

But this is to say that before I got information down the line, my initial response to the hate that came with the film at me pre-premiere was... Was understanding. Yeah, was understandable. Well, so i have a reaction to that i don't want it to take us too far afield and it will sound perhaps cynical because it's a or i mean in reality it's probably i just i have more experience than you had at that point being targeted by dishonest morons um So I would have viewed it differently.

But the fact that you viewed it the way you did proves yet again how ironic it is that you are being targeted as an Islamophobe, as someone who's totally inappropriate to bring us this kind of analysis of the phenomenon of terrorism and our response to it. It's quite insane what is now about to unfold for you. But I want to be clear that I felt that initially, but then things happened that made me change. So for example, before the premiere, it a couple it was like less than a week after the announcement i was got a very distressing email from a translator that we worked with in 2018 so even though my arabic's it's pretty rusty at this point so we i couldn't translate the film myself so um we hired a bunch of translators he was one of them really good guy

and he sent me an email that was really disturbing, basically saying like, so this guy was so excited when the film got into Sundance and that he translated a film that was going to premiere at Sundance. That same day, he bought a ticket to Park City because initially Sundance was supposed to be in person, but it went virtual, basically because of Omicron. And so he bought a ticket to Park City that day. basically because of Omicron. And so he bought a ticket to Park City that day. And then he also posted on all his social media about having translated this film that was going into Sundance. And soon after, he was contacted by one of these people

who were attacking the film. And they messaged him. And they basically said, you have to come out publicly against this film and tell people it's Islamophobic. And he responded, you know, actually, I haven't seen the film yet. But I don't think that that's this film because the footage that I saw, at least I translated, was very humanistic and very, like, character driven and not like that at all. And then she messaged him back and basically said, this was kind of the gist of it i'm summarizing

you're either with us or you're against us and if you don't come out publicly for this film we're essentially going to blacklist you and you'll never work as a translator in the documentary community again and this is a muslim to another muslim and when when he told me this because he sent the initial email and i was really worried for him. So I called him. He was very shaken. He was really shaken by this. And I felt like, I felt like absolute shit. Cause here's the thing when you're, when you're a director, you're responsible for your crew. And at that point the crew was starting to get attacked and I didn't know how to protect them. And I didn't know how to fix this. I didn't know how to make it stop. And I just, I was really taken aback because on the one hand, I wanted to be super empathetic with these people who had experienced these last 20 years of trauma in this

country and viewed my film as a threat to that. But the other hand, it's like, you don't fuck with my people. You want to come at the film, you come at me. But to come after my fucking translator? No, that's fucking bang out of order. Like I was irately pissed. I made Sundance aware. Sundance didn't do anything. In fact, I think that like they handled that quite poorly.

And so for me, I started to shift there when I saw some of the tactics that were being used by this main group. And then I shifted again in March. So up until March, I was trying to take what they were saying as face value. Because I come from a place where I look at documentary filmmaking in some ways as a calling. So when I was a firefighter, it's definitely a profession that's a calling. What I mean by that is there's a specific culture when you're doing something that is a calling. So if I work at Google, I don't think most people would call that a vocation if that's like a calling or whatnot. But in firefighting, we have a very strong culture of loyalty and honesty and sacrifice and duty. And even the shittiest firefighters that I had to work with sometimes, they might lie about how many women they slept with, but they would never lie about doing an equipment check.

And so there was a baseline of like, you don't lie, you tell the truth, you take the hit for the team. If you're a captain, you take the hit for your firefighters. If you're a chief, you take the hit for the captain. It was this chain of command. If you're a leader, that's what you do. And so for me, I think I naively went into the documentary profession, thinking that that same culture existed and was part of what we did. So for example, when you're a journalist, you, and a doc, and a documentary filmmaker, I would hope you favor the truth above all else, even if that's inconvenient for you. You know, and what I mean by that is there's a lot of people who during the whole Me Too movement were like, believe all women.

And there there's some women who lied about stuff. And it's very inconvenient to tell those stories about women who were deceptive and that stuff when you're trying to further a cause. And if you're an activist, you don't highlight those stories. You ignore those stories. But if you're a journalist, yeah, it's inconvenient to talk about that, but that's just the fucking truth. So to ignore that, I think, if you're a journalist and you ignore those stories, then you're no longer a journalist. You're an activist who writes. So in the beginning, when this all happened, we were getting all this hate before anyone seen the film.

But take me back. So you get accepted to Sundance. Yeah. And then Sundance goes virtual. You're getting this hate even before the film is broadcast virtually at Sundance. Take me from there. But I guess I'm interested to know when the wheels really start to come off and you just have the time course of that. Yeah, so what you should know and probably most of your audience doesn't know is how pivotal and important Sundance Film Festival is in the documentary world.

So in the independent documentary space, there is no better festival to premiere at than Sundance. It literally can make your whole entire career and it can launch your film. And what I mean by that is in the category that I'm in, which was in competition for the U.S. competition, they only took 10 films that year. They took less than they normally do. I think normally they take 16, but because of the pandemic, they took less. And so the competition is really high. And also the year that I submitted to was supposed to be the first year in person

since the pandemic. So a lot of people had held off and then submitted to that year. So they got twice the amount of submissions, but took half the amount of films. And I think they get like, I was told like 15,000 or on a normal year. And like,

so twice amount would be 30,000 and submissions. And so when you're talking about my category, they're only taking 10, the competition is quite fierce. And so when those films are seen as the it films of that year, and usually when you get to the Oscars, which is about a year later, most of the films that were nominated premiered at Sundance. So it is a place to launch your career. And it is a place where your film

will get a springboard and a platform and an audience that it would never get anywhere else. And so to get into Sundance is like winning the filmmaker lottery on steroids. And I cannot stress that enough because I think most women, maybe I'm being a little sexist here, but most women think about their, fantasize about their wedding day, what they're going to wear and what it's going to be like. Throughout this whole entire process, in the back of my brain, I was fantasizing about the premiere of this film. And I never thought I would get into Sundance, but that was the fantasy i had of like yeah what my premiere would look like the q a and and it's just it's just it's the thing that people go their whole entire careers and they never get a film into into sundance and so yeah it's competition is fierce so

shit i forgot yeah and you and you could have so the wheels are starting to come off even before the film is shown. Yeah. But what I was saying, the wheels were starting to come off before the film was shown. And at that point, because, like I said before, I was coming from it from a place of, oh, this is from a group of people who've been traumatized. Believe all Muslims. Oh, I just, I thought that everyone was acting in good faith. I thought that everyone was acting in good faith. So what I did is I assumed that this was just a misunderstanding because we had done so many screenings before Sundance with people all across the board. We did a screening with the Yemeni community and Muslim community. We had guards from Guantanamo in the audience and a couple of them. We had MAGA people. We had super activist liberal people and we had never gotten any feedback at all. That was even like a sliver of this is Islamophobic. So I thought this was just a big misunderstanding that because these people hadn't seen the film, they just assumed it was like every

other terrorist film ever made. And so what I did was, I said, Okay, like, if this is just a misunderstanding, let's show them the film because we were still editing at that point, because we weren't done done yet with the film. And so I went to Sundance and this other organization called MPAC. I think it's the Muslim public affairs council. And through each, cause I didn't know who these people were. Cause a lot of this was anonymous at this point.

I invited them. I invited them to, to come and meet me and meet Muhammad and talk to us and ask us any question they wanted and then screen the film. And if they had really good notes and that were made the film better, of course I would have taken them. And so we extended that offer. And what I got with Sundance, they said in the history of Sundance, no one has ever offered to show the people attacking their film before the premiere. And I was like, cause I truly believed that this was just a misunderstanding. But then we heard back from both those entities and they basically said,

you know, they told us they don't want to meet with you. They don't want to meet with Muhammad and they don't want to screen the film. And they also were really offended that you asked them to sign an NDA. We thought we have everyone sign an NDA like before the premiere. This is not just this group. So like in my profession, before film premieres, you do test screenings and you have to have everyone in those test screenings sign an NDA. So for example, my boyfriend went to a test screening of Jordan Peele's Get Out and he had

to sign an NDA. So it's like, it's just industry standard. So at that point, I was like, okay, well, there's really nothing more I can do. And I thought at that point, I just interpreted it as, oh, this is not about me or my film. This is about Sundance. And they're angry that, because I knew it was Muslim documentary filmmakers, that much I did know about the group. So I was like, okay, this is probably like anger at Sundance for programming one of the few films that got in is is a from a non-muslim person telling stories about muslims so i i was like okay this is this is sundance issue not mine but i think the problem was and when i say sundance i i want to differentiate between sundance the institute and sundance the festivals because

they're two different things and i guess we can talk about that later. But I think the wheels came off, partly because of how Sundance handled it. And partly because it was just kind of, so instead of Sundance saying, just watch the film. And after you watch the film, then we'll talk. It was like Sundance taking some of their demands and giving up to us so for example we were given this list of the questions about the film that we they demanded we answer which we'd already answered to Sundance and so it was weird that they wanted one of these in writing and it was pretty clear that this is what what the they're going to give to the group and I was told by the head of Sundance at the time that she had met with the group personally and had a long meeting with them and took their concerns

seriously. And at the whole time, I was like, how can you take their concerns seriously because they haven't seen the film? So for example, what you have to understand is the accusations that were initially being thrown at the film, again, this is before anyone had seen it, was that this was Saudi propaganda and that it was funded by the Saudis and that my co-producer was the saudi government because we have an anonymous co-producer on the project and um and so then sundance gave us a list of questions that had to do with like who funded our film and all that stuff and i was like you guys have seen the film you know that this is horseshit. And so, but I mean, I think Sundance definitely placated to, I shouldn't say placate. I think at the time the head of Sundance was trying to make everyone happy and that it caused

people to be more emboldened about going after the film. Well, also that criticism is ridiculous on its face because the film doesn't make Saudi Arabia look especially good. One thing that happens in the middle of the film is that there's this regime change, and now MBS is running the place, and your access gets curtailed, and everyone gets quite paranoid, and the problem of Saudi authoritarianism becomes a character in the film.

There's no way someone could look at this film, especially not someone at Sundance, who's actually in the business of watching documentaries, and think this is Saudi propaganda. Yeah, I mean, anyone who has actually seen the film would definitely have that takeaway. And what I mean by that, the reason why I'm bringing that up is because instead of Sundance saying, hey, watch the film and then we'll talk, it was meeting after meeting with these people and with me, getting me and my film team to jump through some hoops that they'd never asked anyone to jump through before like they wanted us to have an outside review board look over our film and so

in contrast to Sundance right so we got into a bunch of festivals other than Sundance most of them pulled the film after the controversy one of them didn't and there's it's a film festival called Doc Edge in New Zealand and when it got out that the film was going to play there, there was a professor at San Francisco State University that decided that this was such an egregious thing to play my film that she had to write this festival that was halfway across the globe. Yeah, New Zealand being dressed in her backyard. But this, I got to read you this. I don't even know if you can use this or not, but this is the exchange. And this is what I think Sundance should have done. So this is her writing to the festival.

I'm kind of disappointed that your festival decided to program the now renamed Jihad Rehab. Seems pretty disrespectful to the Muslim community. To which they reply, have you watched the film? If so, we'd love to hear which part of it is disrespectful to the Muslim community, to which she replies, I haven't watched the film, but many members of the Muslim community, especially filmmakers, have and have been critical of it. I think your team must be aware of the controversy in the discourse. The criticism from the community members seems valid and thoughtful. So I'm listening to them

and I'm respecting their opinion. So that's why I'm so disappointed that this film is in your lineup. To which they reply, we highly suggest that you watch the film before expressing any disappointment with our decision to screen it. We know that many, many people who've commented on the film haven't seen it either.

We are more than happy to discuss any concerns with anyone who's actually watched the film. Now, even though that seems like a very simple thing to do, I think if Sundance had done that, this might have gone a lot differently. But they didn't. They really wanted to, again, make everyone happy. And I understand that. You have a group of people who've been marginalized for a really long time. And it's very hard to be a filmmaker in general. It's hard to be a filmmaker and be female. It's even more hard to be a filmmaker in general. It's hard to be a filmmaker and be female. It's even more hard to be a female filmmaker who's Muslim. And so I get Sundance's propensity to try to be empathetic to these people's concerns.

However, I think that you can't address people's concerns of a film they have not seen. you can't address people's concerns of a film they have not seen um so i think the way that sundance dealt with this in terms of having us jump through all these hoops and it cost us an extra twenty thousand dollars to clear the film for the specific requirements that sundance wanted us to have that they didn't ask any other film to do so i think the wheels came off once sundance took that stance and they were wavering like they there was a time when it was clear to me well i interpret anyway sundance set us a bunch of demands and they gave us 48 hour working days but over the if you count the weekend four days to do it in and it was simply i mean i remember talking to my producer at times like there's no way we can do this and i was scared because i was like

they know that there's no way they can do this and they're looking for an excuse to pull the film and so i basically was like we got to do this no matter what because any excuse to pull it they're going to take and so for example typically you have your film run through like errors and omissions and you're through your lawyers once your picture locked. They wanted it done in 24 or 48 hours working days. Our lawyers couldn't do that. So we had to pay them to work over the weekend, which is really expensive. We're talking like when your lawyers cost $1,000 an hour and you haven't worked over

the weekend, it's not cheap. And so they went through our film with a fine tooth comb. we should have been given a lot more time to do this you always have to do it but to do it that early on was really expensive and to do it in that time frame we also had to have someone who was an outside person review the entire film and interview me and interview my producer about how we made the film and consent forms and if the consent forms were in English and Arabic and if they were understood and how we basically got informed consent and so all that stuff we did and it was instead of finishing the film in terms of editing it we were doing all that kind of stuff And I think that it was alarming at the time. I think looking back, it's even more alarming because

it wound up setting a precedent that I think is very worrisome going forward, meaning that if the most prestigious film festival in the world had a small group of people who were protesting a film they hadn't seen and then that film festival required special audits for a film i did it just it just to me it was just so unusual and when i talked to other people with a lot more experience they were also alarmed by what was happening and kind of the because you don't have review boards like this this is it what was happening and kind of the, because you don't have review boards like this. This is,

it's the point was one of the people who kind of came to our defense at the time said, who is better positioned to kind of tell like what is on the up and up in the film. People have actually been to that country and spent years with these protagonists or someone who's never stepped foot in the kingdom and just is reviewing a film that they know nothing about like it just seemed like they wanted to check a box um rather than actually kind of like taking the film and talking to people who actually knew like we worked with experts on the film we had like people in the state department people in the department of fence

people in saudi arabia like we had a lot of people state department people in the department of fence people in saudi arabia like we had a lot of people who knew a lot about this subject that i consulted with and i think that if they just said we want we would like to talk to some of your consultants that would have made sense to me but i don't know it was just a very it definitely felt like they were looking for an excuse to pull the film because they were getting so much heat from this group so i think that's when the wheel started even not to come off yet but that's when the wheel started getting a little bit loose it was also pulled from south by southwest right it was accepted there and then yeah that was yeah that was wasn't it was not an exit it was disinvited

so that was really hard for me because you have to understand that I have a special relationship with that film festival. Like my last film premiered at South by and it won South by Southwest won the top award. And that kind of launched my career. And I had become friends because of that with some of the people who work there and some of the programmers. And this was my first feature length documentary. And when I submitted it there, one of the programmers called me and was just gushing about it. And she's like, Hey, like I wanted to call you earlier, but we were waiting on one of our last programmers to see it. And we all were curious what he was going to say, because it was really important what his opinion was because he's actually a vet. And so before we extended the invitation, we wanted to see what he thought about the film.

And he said it was extraordinary. And they were so excited about the film and they were really really like she was really nice on the phone she's like it's so great to see you do this project after your last one and see how much you've grown as a filmmaker and as a storyteller and uh yeah and i and i remember telling them you know i couldn't accept the the premiere, but I would still like to premiere their accepted Sundance. And they were like, sure, we would love to have it. And we, when you go to a film festival like South by, you have to sign contracts that basically is a screening agreement. And so they signed it and you sign it and you both agree that you're going to play there. And yeah, it was really, really hard for me because I look at, I looked at South by as kind of going home, right? Like this is a place

that launched my career. And the person who runs South by is this very like ball-busting, independent woman who's a force of nature. And to have some- So how does a ball-busting, independent woman who's a force of nature cave to this pressure which upon examination is obviously in bad faith i mean what was what was that interaction with her like well i think you had one yeah no i had i had many interactions i think there was like on the record off the record type stuff right not like in terms of on the record off there's the emails that are in written form and then there's conversations we had on the phone. Early on, before they actually pulled the film, I talked to someone who worked at South By and they expressed worry about the film because of all the controversy and all the attacks that Sundance got. And they basically said, listen, Sundance has one of the most diverse programming teams in our industry.

Black, white, straight, gay. I mean, they're really diverse. We are an all-white programming team. And we're going to just take a really big hit if we program this film. So that was a conversation that I had. And then later on, when they were wavering, they basically said, for us to even consider this film, we need you to have a crisis PR team, which cost a lot of money, and we didn't have that money. And so I went to one of our investors, and we literally hired someone for two weeks, because that's all we can afford to force

for South by as like, okay, this is some this is a hoop you wanted us to jump through, we're going to jump through it. I was really looking forward to South by because it was going to be in person. And being in person is way better when you need to have those complicated and really hard discussions after a film so typically you premiere a film and afterwards there's a long q a and you talk about your film and how it's made and then you take questions from the audience and you're able to look someone face to face whereas in sundance was virtual this was all on Twitter and Twitter is a fucking cesspool of like horribleness like I just I don't I'm not on Twitter but I the way I would describe it to people is it's like it's like a lunch cafeteria lunchroom at a high school but instead of one

table being mean girls they're all every fucking table's mean girls right so it's not it's not a place to have nuanced and complicated and human conversations and so i think that added to the vitriol of the film at sundance and so that's why i was really looking forward to south by because it was i felt it was an opportunity to really have an open dialogue and conversation about this film that had caused so much controversy and so when before we get to that other shoe dropping, let's just run through what the criticism was up to this point and who it was coming from, if you could discern different actors here. I mean, so you've talked about one allegation that it was Saudi propaganda. That's

just ridiculous on its face. What else was coming at you? So initially it was Saudi propaganda. That's just ridiculous on its face. What else was coming at you? So initially it was Saudi propaganda funded by the Saudis. And then people saw the film and that one went away. And then it was the filmmaker is racist and the film is Islamophobic and that was made by an all white non-Muslim team. But then we're like, well, my executive producer is Muslim, my co-producer is Muslim. Our assistant editor is Muslim. And we worked with two Islamic scholars and an imam on this film. And then we had prominent Muslims like Lorraine Ali, who works for the LA Times. She's a film critic for the LA Times. And she came out saying that she really liked the film.

And she'd spent time in Saudi Arabia and really, really kind of said it was extraordinary in terms of the access and filmmaking that I was able to pull off. kind of said it was extraordinary in terms of the access and filmmaking that I was able to pull off. And we've already established that you're not your average white chick making this exploitative act of cultural appropriation. Yeah, well, I think, yeah, so that was one. And then and that was one for a long time. And then and there was like, you know, just basically equating that that these guys didn't give consent. The next that these guys didn't give consent. The next one was they didn't give consent.

They were forced to do this by the Saudi government. And again, literally, if they just talked to me, I could have told them how I got access and how I talked to like over 150 of these guys. Most of them didn't want to do it. But so they didn't give consent and they didn't sign release forms and all stuff and so you know and then we're like no everyone signed release forms both in english and arabic and informed consent was something that i take very seriously so let me back up here so informed consent is something that in the documentary community is something where when you're working with someone who's a subject of a film, before you can start that film, you basically sit them down and say,

here's who I am, here's the project I'm making. And so with these guys specifically, it was important for me to explain to them how a documentary was made, because most people don't know. And so I told them, this isn't going to be one interview. I'm going to be with you for a very long time. I'm going to be following you home to your interview. I'm going to be with you for a very long time. I'm going to be following you home to your family.

I'm going to be maybe interviewing your family and your friends. I'll be filming you when you're in the streets. Like this is not a one and done thing. I'll be in your life for quite a long time. And the way that I do informed consent, I think everyone's different. But when I approach a subject for a film, I always meet them first without a camera. And I tell them two things. I say, you know, this is a very long process and I want you to feel comfortable with me and comfortable with what we're going to do together. meeting you can ask and throughout this process that I'm going to be filming you I'm going to ask you a lot of questions and sometimes those questions are going to be very personal and you don't have to obviously don't have to answer them but like what this first meeting that we have I

was like I you're allowed to ask me anything you want anything and I will answer it honestly and it can be anything from my favorite color to like one guy asked, you know, first date or why I wasn't married and why I didn't have kids. And it's basically I flip it around that first time and allow them to be the interviewer to me to say, like, who is this person that I'm going to be sharing my life with? And so we do that. And then at the very end of it, I say, listen, if you are not if you don't feel comfortable with me, I actually do not want you to do this project for two reasons. Number one, it will show up on camera and that won't look good. Number two, I've had a documentary made about me

that I really didn't give my permission for and it was a very bad experience and I wouldn't wish that on anyone else. So sidebar here, when I was 23, or 23, 22, 23, I was kidnapped in Columbia and then later on National Geographic made a docudrama about it and the woman that played me was super hot so I'm got not too mad at it but like it definitely not very accurate but yeah and so I I tell that to all the subjects

the the films that I've made and and if they agree then before we ever film with them you give them a piece of paper. And it's in their own language, but it's also in English on the same piece of paper. Let me just get this straight for a second. So you went to Afghanistan, having already been kidnapped in Colombia? No, I went to Afghanistan before going to Colombia. I went to Afghanistan in 2002. I went to Colombia in 2003. I went back to Afghanistan in 2004, though. So this was like a sandwich between Afghanistan.

I'm just trying to figure out just how unusual a person you are. If I had gone to Colombia and gotten kidnapped, I don't think I would be quite as carefree in my subsequent travels solo across the war-torn reaches of the world. Well, if we're being honest, I think one of the reasons why I made this film is not the only, but it's one of the reasons why I made this film is because what went down in Columbia. The group that kidnapped me was called the AUC and their reputation is they're known as the headhunters. And they have that reputation because they disembowel and decapitate their victims in front of their family to kind of send a message

so they're they're pretty they're they're a pretty gnarly group so long story short you know being kidnapped is not like what you see in the movies like there's there's not huge explosions and men dressed in all black going on long diatribes. It's more, it's actually quite boring sometimes because you don't have any like internet or forms of distraction or, you know, cell phones or anything like that or music. So a lot of the times you're just sitting around

and you're just talking to your fellow captives and eventually you talk to your captors and you have these long conversations. And for me, you know, I was kidnapped for a little bit under two weeks i think it was around 10 days give or take and um the thing that was most unnerving to me was not what these men and women did like they disemboweled and decapitated seven people that i knew and then they also shot one guy as well these are people you were traveling with or just people you knew because they were fellow captives while you were there? So basically,

this is probably a different podcast, but I was traveling through Panama and was going overland into Columbia through the Darien Gap. And to go through that, it's basically the Darien Gap is like 250 mile stretch of virgin jungle that straddles the border. And to navigate through there, like the jungle is so thick, GPS doesn't work. And so to navigate through that space, you need to have the local Kuna Indians basically, who know the landscape and otherwise you'd just be lost. And so we had befriended some people at one of the villages and they were taking us through the forest and the jungles. And then we went to another village.

So it would be like we started at one village, and then they would drop us off at a different village. And then that village would guide us to the next part. And so the people that they killed were people that had been in the villages that we met that were like elders and leaders. And they'd taken us in. And yeah, it was yeah it was pretty they killed seven people and then they basically pillaged and burned the villages to the ground because the the AUC so I don't know how much you know about Colombian politics but the FARC FARC is the only one I know okay yeah so yeah. So the FARC is like Marxist, right? So let's, for example, if you're a FARC person and you want to take a big stretch of land

and cut it up and give each person one hectare, right? That's your kind of Marxist mentality type thing. If you're a landowner, you really don't want that. And you want to keep your land. And so basically, the FARC is out there and this kind of like you know for the people type group and and their I guess their strategies and tactics and the the the AUC is actually a group that was used to be in the military but then because of their antics they quickly got disbanded and they I think I think I remember reading they are actually trained by

special forces in the Colombian military by us and And then they got disbanded, but then the landowners kind of were like, oh, this group is kind of great for us. And so the landowners kind of pay the AUC and help that group to kind of fight the FARC because the FARC is the more well-off people's enemy. well-off people's enemy and so as one of the things the AUC did is it would kill the FARC and then kill any FARC sympathizers because it's kind of like send a message right so a lot of places the FARC can't really operate that well unless they have like local support and so one of the things the AUC does is you know really devastate these villages by disemboweling and decapitating their leaders in front of their people. And then also they burn them to the ground. And so if they catch someone and they

think they're a FARC sympathizer, that's what they do to try to send the message. And so, so yeah, so that's how I knew those people. And then while I was kidnapped, I got beaten up one time, but that was my own doing. I don't know if you've noticed from this conversation, I sometimes... You might've said something that's considered inappropriate. Maybe, yeah. My dad always said that the squeaking wheel gets old, but the screaming wheel gets changed. And when we were kidnapped, they wanted us to do something that I did not want to do. And I was trying to distract them with something else so I could continue to do what I wanted to do. It worked in the end, but it cost me an AK-47 butt to the head and I bled out all over the place. And other than that, I was pretty unscathed.

So I think I derailed you. You were about to say that you talked to these maniacs and they proved to be normal human beings with whom you could share some. Well, no, like the thing is, yeah, we were, I talked to these people and one of them was this like 16 year old girl and she would, you know, talk about her high school crushes and, um, you know, things that 16 year old girls talk about. And, uh, it was so alarming to me because, you know, when you're a kid, you're read stories about, you know, the good witch and the bad witch, like the good people and the bad people. And I think a lot of us, when we get older, we don't actually leave that worldview.

And we see the world in that very simplistic view of good and bad. And I think I was guilty of that before I got kidnapped. And when I got kidnapped and I met these people and they had done by all accounts, probably some of the most evil acts you can do. But they weren't these bloodthirsty psychopaths that I had imagined. They were just a run of the mill, normal young men and women. And then when you got to talk to them, like this girl that I was talking to, her parents had been killed by the FARC. And so her logical solution to that was to join the rival group and go after the FARC. And so she joined the AUC. And the thing that shook me so much is how normal all these people were. And I think that was so, that shook me so much is how normal all these people were.

And I think that was the catalyst that sent me on this trajectory to try to understand the other, you know, the, the, the evil doers in quotes of the world, because it was such a, like I said before, with firefighting and not understanding hazmat and then being an expert in it, it was kind of like after i had that experience in colombia it was really unnerving to think that the people in the world who did the worst deeds were no different from me and that was very unnerving and so i kind of sent me on this trajectory where i sought out those kind of people. So I interviewed lots of pirates in Somalia,

warlords in Afghanistan, arms dealers in Pakistan and the province there and the tribal territories on the border and terrorists in Saudi Arabia. And I think for me, if you're gonna look back, I think the original pebble that set that ripple off was probably being kidnapped. And I know that you said your reaction would not be to go calivating all over the world. Just wash the blood off my passport and then go to Mogadishu?

Yeah. But I think for me, it's the opposite. It was just like, this is something that I clearly did not understand. The people who do evil deeds weren't born that way. I, for some reason in my brain, thought they are fundamentally different from me. But becoming face-to-face with someone who had just performed a horrific deed like disemboweling and decapitating someone, prowling decapitating someone and then sitting down and talking about makeup and your favorite football team was very very unnerving especially for a 23 year old at the time i think it was 23 at the time yeah so yeah that that that i think started the shift to really try to understand that part of the world does that make sense yeah yeah I would just add as a footnote, my view here, which is that there are many sources of human violence and they're distinct, but they can be, you know, violence can be overdetermined, right? So there, you know,

I think, I know I differentiated this in a blog post somewhere, but I think there really are psychopaths who are different from you and me. And then there are quite normal people who, based on their beliefs about the world and about the moral imperatives of certain ways of living, they are just like you and me, but they believe different things. And they do, by our lights, horrible things in the service of those ideas. And then there are people who have, who get caught up in some kind of spiral of vendetta-like violence of the sort you just indicated, where, you know, they have a story about why certain people are worth targeting because of what they did to people close to them, right? And so it's, you know, there's just this

cycle of hatred begetting hatred. And then there's just frank mental illness where people are delusional and they don't even know what they're doing, but they're doing something horrible. And all of these can be overlapping. You can check a few of these boxes and have your violence be overdetermined. I would say, so I would add to that in terms of like, that was my initial exposure. But over the years of interviewing people and talking to people, like I've heard before, like the pirates in Somalia and some of the warlords in Afghanistan and the fighters in Afghanistan. I would say that there were a, they're the exception to the rule, but there were a handful of times where I talked to someone that gave me, and I call it the ibbid jibbies where you're like oh like you are you like to hurt people you you derive like you're doing this and the excuse is you know piracy but you like to you do you're off there's something a bit off about them the majority of them know though i would say that my experience has been that there are people who are i would say very scary kind of psychopaths but those are the rare rarity in my in my experience not the rule but more the exception no i would agree yeah yeah i mean it's the difference between

someone like abu musab al-zarkawi and osama bin Laden, right? I mean, insofar as I feel like I can know these guys from a distance, everything I know about Zarqawi is that he was a proper psycho. Oh, you'll love this. I was living in Yemen, and one of the people I knew that was working at the British embassy, who, like, for embassies, they have people fly in if you're, like, going on leave, and they'll have someone fly in from the home office for like a week or two to look after your post who isn't really familiar with the country. And there was this woman I met and apparently she was just going over that days, like, you know, until rundown.

She goes, and this is a direct quote. She goes, that's a cow. It not a nice man, not a nice man. Yeah, that's, that's a good way to put it yeah okay so back back to your film and uh i guess uh we were we left you at uh getting ejected from south by yeah so that was that one really hurt and then and then there was another film festival the san francisco documentary film festival And this one really, really hurt because one of the programmers had reached out during Sundance and not only invited the film to the festival, but he also had offered me the Vanguard Award, which is a huge honor.

And so basically, the Vanguard Award usually goes to people who are like well-known filmmakers who have a catalog of work that have just been kind of groundbreaking. And the fact that I was offered this award after my first feature was super humbling. And the Vanguard Award is the way they presented this film festival. It's a whole weekend event. So they screen your film and then there's a Q&A and then there's a panel discussion and there's a huge gala and there's a dinner and it's a it's a huge huge deal and uh you know he said to me like i i have i've been doing this for a while and i've never seen a film like this and i cannot believe this is your first feature-length film and we want to give you the vanguard award and and i was really there was a different there was another festival in san francisco that was probably a little more

prestigious that also invited us but because they were this other festival was offering the vanguard award to decide to go with them and i was really looking forward to it because i'm from the bay area and a lot of people who helped on the film from the yemeni community also live here and i thought it'd be great to have to be able to have them come to the theater and see on the big screen and see like all their hard work put in and then be honored at a gala. And, you know, I thought it was gonna be such a great event. And about a month or two before it was supposed to take place, he reached out to me and he was pretty devastated. And he basically said, I'm going to have to revoke the Vanguard Award. And I was like, what did I do? Why?

And he's like, I talked to the other programmers and they felt that by giving you this award now with all the controversy, it would be sticking the thumb in the eye of the people protesting your film and they don't want to do it. And I was like, well, I mean, you know, you did offer me the award. You saw the film. I'm like, I know that you saw it. Have the other programmers watched the film?

And he said, no. I was like, wait a minute. You're telling me these other programmers have not seen the film, but based on Twitter and social media, they want to take away this award. And he's like, yes. He's like, I know it know it makes no sense he's like i feel so bad about this it's not my decision we have to come to consensus and he's like if we play your film i'm like whoa whoa whoa if you just talked about like taking like you offered me the vanguard award and now we're talking about the film being pulled and i was kind of pleading with him not to do this because we hadn't had an opportunity because we had, it got pulled from other places too. We had all this, you know, we didn't have a chance to screen the film and have the dialogue that I really think we needed

to in order to turn the kind of tide and actually have the difficult discussions that needed to happen with this film. And so... But honestly, from my point of view, those discussions wouldn't have even happened because there is no difficult discussion to be had about this film. I mean, again, the difficult discussion, if there is one, would be had from the other side, like from the neocon, we have to be hard on terrorism side, right? I mean, this is like the Donald Rumsfelds of the world would have a problem with your film. But I mean, there is no problem to be had with this film.

When I say difficult discussion, so I don't know how much you know about the documentary community, but there is a big conversation that's been happening for the last couple of years about representation and who's telling whose story and why. And that's been a very hot topic. And also- Well, that's actually my next question. So all of this pushback,

the pushback's coming from the Muslim community. No, it's not coming. It's coming from the... I want to make this very clear because we had a lot of people who we've shown the film to, a lot of groups that we've shown the film to, pre and post Sundance, that were from the Muslim community that love this film. This was a group of, not the Muslim community, it was a group of Muslim documentary filmmakers specifically. I just want to point that out. So Muslim documentary filmmakers are playing the Islamophobia card on you, again, quite inappropriately. But then how much of the rest of the pushback and pressure on these on these festivals is coming from not from Muslims of, you know, any description, but just from. Allies. Woke activists who think that you are guilty of cultural appropriation or, you know, whatever the other sin is here. or whatever the other sin is here.

Yeah, there was a lot of that, and a lot of that that was pretty harsh. I would say one of the hardest things about this whole entire... I hate the word cancellation because it's such a loaded word and it means different things to different people, but do you know of a better word to use? I'm not sure. Your film was canceled, as far as I can tell. I mean, once you have festivals withdrawing awards and withdrawing invitations, and I mean, that is the very essence of cancellation, and it's not,

you know, or deplatforming. I mean, that's another term of modern jargon here, which is also not a great word. I mean, censorship is the wrong word because it's not... Government, yeah. Yeah, the government is not doing this. But it's, you know, I'm sure it's an old phenomenon, but the modern variant is to have completely disingenuous hysteria directed at you, largely, and anyone who would collaborate with you,

largely on social media, and just watch the failures of moral courage play out before you where everyone begins to fall like dominoes in the indicated direction. You find out who your friends are. Well, I will say this. I think Louis C.K. had it in his special after getting canceled. He's like, when you're canceled, you find out real quickly who your real friends are. And sometimes it's not the people you want. Yeah, exactly. That was a very funny bit. Yeah.

Yeah. I was like, oh my gosh, I feel seen. No. So for me, there was two of the hardest things were I'm not on Twitter very much at all. I mean, I have an account, but I never check it. And mostly because like we've been talking now for a while and I like having these in-depth conversations where you can go on tangents and talk about things and their complexity and all the nuance. And Twitter for me has always been a place where it's very black and white. It's very either you're a good person or you're a bad person.

You're a person we should be attacking or villainize or you should be a hero. And I just don't think the world works that way. And so I avoid Twitter, like the mean girl cafeteria that it is. But the thing for me that was the hardest part of this was twofold. One was there were people that I considered friends, like true friends, that when this happened, they either completely turned on me or they stopped talking to me or they just flat out lied and kind of threw me under the bus in order to... I'm not sure what their motivation was, I don't want to speak to that, but I'll give you an example. There was a woman who, she was a friend of mine, and she's a documentary filmmaker. And she was also trying to establish herself as a story consultant. And basically what a story consultant is, is someone who comes in and watches your film and gives you notes and kind of helps

you work out the kinks. And so we had just got some funding and we were in the editing process. And so I was like, you know, I want to do My Friend is Solid and hire her as a story consultant. And we worked with her for five days for a week. And after we worked with her, she wrote this really sweet post on social media about working with me in the film. And I'll read it to you now. It says, you know, a director who gives a damn. Megan didn't just take on any story for her first feature. This is one of the most important films I've ever worked on. Thank you for your trust, your vision, your guts, Meg. You are the perfect person to be telling the story and i'm so fucking proud of you for never backing down i'm in awe rooting for you and i took a screenshot of that because i would it just

made me feel really good so i was like oh yeah it's such a hard thing to make a film in general but this film is particularly hard for a plethora of reasons and so i took a screenshot of it i had in my phone and then you know when we got into Sundance, we were making the credits of the film. I took a screenshot of her name and the credits as a story consultant. And I texted it to her like, you know, look, you're in the credits. It's like, awesome. And she's like, oh, clap, clap, clap, emoji, congrats. And so that's where, you know, that's where we're at and then the controversy hits

and this person who you know I considered her like a true friend not like a like a film friend but like an actual friend without talking to me and according to my producer she actually hadn't seen the final cut of the film before she posted this online. So the controversy hit, people are kind of going really furious at me in the film. And then this person posts on social media, again, without, according to my producer, having seen the film says this, I've been taking time off of social media for the last few months, but wanted to post something about my involvement with Jihad Rehab, as my name is listed predominantly in the credits as a story consultant. I have not had any involvement in creating and the crafting of this film's story, and I haven't seen a cut of the film in over two years.

I was brought on as a story consultant in the fall of 2019, and saw a rough cut to give notes on. I voiced serious concern around the ethics of the film and the general approach to the story. I was insistent that the title should change and was led to believe that it would be. In the session, it was clear that my notes and concerns were not being heard. I left the consulting session extremely frustrated and concerned. I was shocked that the film was accepted to Sundance and then shocked again

when I told my name was in the credits. Again, I'd sent her a screenshot of it. I strongly feel this criticism from the Muslim Arab and our film community is valid and needs to be heard. I'm in full support of the filmmakers voicing their outrage about the film,

and I am disappointed and disgusted by the response of the filmmakers so far. If you'd like to learn more about the important conversations around the film, there are many articles by respected filmmakers and voices of our community, and she lists a couple of them. Now, this person never said any of that.

They never said they had a problem with the title. They never voiced anything about the film being Islamophobic. They completely rewrote history and lied. And the thing that's alarming to me is this is a documentary film. Did she delete that effusive tweet that you took a screenshot of? Or is that still in her timeline? All that's still online, yeah. So the only reason I'm okay reading all that's still online yeah so i'm the only

i'm okay reading all that is because it's public there's a lot of people who did a lot of other stuff behind the scenes but i think that if you're going to publicly lie about the film and about me and about working with me then it's okay for me to publicly call you out on it and especially if you're claiming to be a documentary slash truth teller like for me like once like once I read that, I was like, okay, we're done. You're no longer my friend. I'm not even going to waste any energy on you because I didn't need to know why she did it. The fact that she did it was just reprehensible to me.

Yeah. Yeah. So now where does Abigail Disney come into the picture? So Abigail was one of, she wasn't our first funder. She was one of the earliest. I think it was the first year. After the first year, I think she came on as an investor. I will say this, like, I see Abigail's kind of getting dragged through the mud by some people right now.

But I want to say that this film, she was, in the beginning, she was a filmmaker's dream investor she so i had spoke this is a how do you put this for a filmmaker like me who doesn't have a huge track record to take on a subject like this i got laughed out of the room majority of the time when I pitched this film for funding in the beginning. I probably had 65, 75 meetings with potential investors those first two years. And I met with a lot of people. And for the first two years, I think the only people that invested in the film were all women. It's not until I got a proper cut and a bunch of footage that the men started investing in it. Because I get it though. I mean, there's a limited amount of funds in the non-fiction world and if a first-time filmmaker looking like me came to you and said i'm going to make a film in saudi arabia at this center that

no one's been able to get access to my first time out of the gate you'd be like i'm not going to waste money on that project but i remember i showed the the some footage to Abby's people at Fork Films, and then I kind of told them about my background, cliff note version, not the version we're talking about today. And they were really into it. And they said, you know, but ultimately, the decision comes down to Abby. you know, a lot of the other investors were looked at me and basically said, like, you know, you don't really have a track record. You don't have this and that and the other. But Abby sat down with me and to her credit, she was like, no, you're going to do this. I can tell. Like she knew that I was a tenacious motherfucker and that no matter what, this was going to get done. And she didn't need a track record to tell her that. She just is really good, I guess, at reading people. But she was on board, and so she became one of our... An investor about...

I think it was the first year that we were doing it. Without her... She was our first big investor. Without her first initial funds, this film would... I'm not saying this film would have never gotten made, but it would have been a lot harder. What was the budget? What was the budget on the film? I think... this film would, I'm not saying this film would never got made, but it would have taken a lot, it would have been a lot harder. And so I got to give credit where credit's due. What was the budget on the film? I think so.

Or how much did you have to raise? We had to, so I'm going to include the things that we didn't pay because we have a lot of people. And one of the things that I hate about this film being canceled is most of the people who worked on this project worked either for free or deferred or at a reduced rate where they were going to get paid back after we sold the film. Right. So I'm going to include the money that we actually have not paid out yet to into that number. So it's,

it's over, it's over a million dollars. And what did Abigail give to you? Can you say that? I don't know if I can. I would say this. It was way less than a third of the budget. Way less than that.

So I think some people think she came in for the full amount. But it was like, I don't know. It was not a huge amount for the whole budget. I don't know it was it was not a huge it was not a huge amount for the whole budget but at that particular time it was it was fucking quintessential for us to move forward so the thing is I think a lot of people when they date people and they break up with them they're like oh that guy's a fucking asshole it's like I've always kind of come to the view of like I'm friends with all my exes and you know I dated you for a reason you You're a great person. We just weren't great together. And I try to be fair with people. And so I know a lot of people are kind of coming after Abby and right now. And I think, I mean, you know this, but being canceled is kind of like having kids in the aspect of when you you can read books about being parent about parenting and you can see your friends raise their kids but until you push that watermelon

through that cheerio and you're responsible for human life you have no fucking clue and i had seen joe rogan get you know air quotes canceled. And I had seen Dave Chappelle get canceled. And I was like, those people have fuck off money. Like it's kind of, they're going to take a hit, but they'll be fine. But what I didn't realize then and what I realize now is just the extent of it and how the mental and emotional toll it takes when you have people that you trusted turn on you when you have your reputation being unfairly besmirched and people taking it at face value and how isolating it can be and how just devastating to be and I and I say this as someone who has lived

quite a full life where I've been in situations that most people would say would be very full on insanely kind of like stressful throughout my whole entire life. I've had a lot of, I mean, being kidnapped, being a firefighter, I've had a lot of really intense experiences and I've never had bouts of depression and I've never had suicidal tendencies. And I did with this. And so I know people will probably listen to this and think being canceled is not a big deal, but I'm not, I don't have a lot of resources. And I come from working class. My dad was a firefighter. I was a firefighter. I don't come from working class my dad was a firefighter I was a firefighter I don't come from money I'm not dressed like a kid so it was emotionally and mentally devastating but financially

just wrecked me and um so when I see people kind of going after Abby right now I think a lot of people would think that I'd be like yeah but I'm the opposite I I worry about her because I know the toll it takes and I don't think that anyone anyone deserves this I don't fucking care who you are like people are human they make mistakes and the reason why initially when Abby put out the film the reason why I was pretty I didn, I wasn't angry at her initially because I knew what we were all going through emotionally. And initially I was a little bit upset and my best friend pointed out, and she's very good at this. She said, you know, most people are not wired like you, Meg. You're very good under pressure and you got to be patient with other people. And Abby will probably come around,

but like, you know, give her some space and maybe she'll come back to the film but most people don't handle things like you do so like have a have a bit of grace and a bit of kindness and just give her some space and maybe she'll come come back to the film but then she issued that apology and that was kind of the nail in the head or the nail in the coffin and also I guess also nail in the head but my point would be that Abigail Disney invested in this film when no one else, not no one else did, everyone else kind of told us no

and gave this film life. And for that, I will always hold her in high regard. And I don't, like, she's not a bad person. What she did, I think, was very cowardly. And I think a lot of people in her

position would probably have done the same thing because they don't know what it's like to have that kind of pressure on you. So I understand it. I don't agree with it. And I think if you're an industry leader like Sundance and Abigail Disney, I guess I just expected more of Sundance and more of some of our industry leaders and I've just been disappointed and but I also don't think that those those institutions or the people that work there or Abigail deserve the treatment that I got because I think that some people are starting to kind of go after Abigail like that and I just would stress that please please don't for me, like just no one deserves this kind of shit. It's really, you have no idea what it's like unless you're, until you're in the eye of the storm and it's, it's fucking shit. It's really shit. Well, let me demur however

slightly from that incredibly patient and compassionate response to the, um, this fake controversy that has been aimed at you. I mean, we've already established in your world there are not a lot of bad people, and I basically agree with that. But in your experience, that extends even to people who are decapitating and disemboweling innocent villagers by day and then keeping you captive at night. So, yes, I don't mean to...

Somebody said, they told me my film was, what did they say? If empathy was an extreme sport, that is jihad rehab. Yes, that's really great. Yeah, so yeah, I'll put you into the Empathy Olympics. You're my athlete. Well, at least I get some award. I'll take it when I can get it. So I read Abigail's apology letter and people should know

there's a New York Times article on you. I think, is it Michael Powell who wrote that? Yeah, Michael Powell, that dude, solid fucking dude. Like, here's the thing. I, throughout this whole process, I don't know if you've experienced this but when when i was initially being attacked the journalists i put this in air quotes you can't see but i put just it in the journalists that were writing about it would contact me and with like two or three questions they wanted written answers to and it was like now that your film's been canceled, do you like consider the fault that you did or wrong? And it was clear that they had already written a narrative that they just wanted a soundbite for. And for me,

it was an experience of realizing that most people that I had to deal with, I wouldn't consider good journalists. Yeah. And you could well, you really kind of got lucky at the Times in my view. I mean, you could well have suffered that fate from the New York Times. So here's what happened with the New York Times. So I had a friend who used to be the head film critic at the Atlantic. And before Sundance, while I was still editing the film, I sent him a copy of the film and I said Chris I want you to rip my fucking film apart because I don't want to hear any of this shit after the premiere so I want you to rip it apart now so I know like where the holes are that I can patch up that's why I

sent him the film and he wrote me back and he was like a I can't believe this is your first feature film because it's fucking extraordinary he's like b i have like two small small notes but that's about it um but he was really impressed by the film and really taken aback by it and then about two months after sundance he called me and he said it's always always makes me laugh he's like so are you counting your millions from your sundance sale and swatting away jobs i was like oh clearly you haven't been following this story so i told him what happened and i told him about all the stuff that wasn't online like the lawyer threats and you know writing to the reviewers threatening to sue them unless they change the reviews and all that kind of stuff and and i told him you know i said everyone wants me to like do an op-ed to

address this but honestly i just don't think that's the right thing because no one is believing anything I say. And I tried to talk to journalists before and everyone just wouldn't listen to me. And I'm and I just, you know, I don't think an op-ed is going to change that. And Chris was like, you need like a proper journalist to investigate this. Like someone who is an actual investigative journalist who is like old school og journalist and um i was like cool but i don't fucking know anyone like that and i doubt anyone because like the problem that i ran into and i tried to do that before is every journalist told me the same thing they said we can't write about a film that is no one can see like that just

doesn't make sense. Like, what are our readers going to go watch? Like, this doesn't make sense. We can't write about this film. And so Chris said he knew a handful of people. And he said, but there's one guy I think would be probably the best to tell this story because he is very just the facts. He's not an opinion writer. He's a very, like, he's a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative

journalist. And I was very hesitant. And I kind of said, like, well, I'll just see what he says, you know, maybe I'll do it, maybe I won't. So Chris introduced us and I sent him a link to the film. And then he didn't watch it. I sent him a link to the film, and he didn't watch it because there's a time expires on the on the links. And then then i sent him a third one and if i remember correctly i said something like you know because i felt like when i sent him the third you're now a stalker yeah i was like i feel like that really geeky girl in high school that keeps on asking out the captain the football team like at some point this is going to get fucking awkward so he finally watched it and then he and then I think he went online and looked at all the vitriol against the film and then he

kind of contacted me he's like his first sentence was like I don't understand this and so he jumped on a call and I gave him a little bit of background and he said I really want to do a story in this I really want to dive into this this is very interesting to me and I said I'm not sure I want to do this and then i basically said like i need to know who you are as a person and so i did the thing that i let my subjects do to me i said i need to interview you and looking back now i feel like a complete asshole because i had no idea who michael powell was and i didn't know his like esteemed like it's basically like saying like you don't trust woodward and bernstein or walter cronkite like i was just like i don't know the

fuck you are you could be another journalist gonna fuck fuck me over. So yeah, I interviewed him and I was like, you know, why did you get into journalism? And, um, what did you, what do you think about X, Y, Z? And I talked to him for a really long time. And then he just, he's just a real standup dude. He is like, I mean, I know a lot of people have issues with the times and I think there's reporters over there that are questionable, but he's definitely one of the good ones and he he interviewed me he flew out to california and he interviewed me for i think total of 18 hours because obviously this is a very long story and every time i said something he was like do you have proof of that and it was very thorough like he wanted the receipts like he was like i'm not going to write anything that i can't prove and um so yeah

talked for like 18 hours and then he like went away and that was in may and he just took a really deep dive into this and i think they published it in late september so he's working on this for a pretty long time and that's why a lot of people like oh i think they're acting like he just met me yesterday and wrote this thing, but it was pretty involved. He's a solid dude, for sure. apology letter, which originally was an email she sent privately to a bunch of people who were aggrieved or pretending to be aggrieved by your film. And then she made it public at a certain point. And I see why she's getting attacked, because it's a fairly abject capitulation to the mob, especially given what your film is. I mean, this is just, this is not even a close call, right? I mean, it's just like, I could imagine some film where in response to blowback, her letter could be appropriate, right? I mean, like, but she's,

you know, she has just caved so fully in the face of what is, upon analysis, a completely dishonest campaign against your film. And in addition to that, she's essentially vowed to fund the projects of the people who canceled you. Yeah, that's what I last time I heard that's what she was doing. Yeah, so that part's amazing. So, and it's, you know, in her case, it's not, I don't know if she's a billionaire, but she's, she's at least a couple hundred millionaires. She's wealthy, you know, she's a Disney heir and she's spoken about that. And so if, if that kind of wealth doesn't give you courage, right. I mean, it's like she's not in the position you were in where getting besmirched in one way or the other stands a chance of having catastrophic financial impact on you, right? Yeah.

I mean, I put her in the same category as like Joe Rogan, Dave Chappelle, where it's like, they will definitely be hurt by being canceled, but they're not going to get homeless for being like, I have to, I'm moving from, I live in the Bay Area now, and I just haven't been able to get work since Sundance. And the Bay Area is a very expensive place to live. So I'll be moving in January, because I just can't afford to live here anymore. Unfortunately, I really love it here. But there's just, if I can't work, I can't live in this expensive place. So, yeah. Well, so I want to talk about that. Because these are the consequences of being…

A normal person and being an army? Yeah, hurled from the ramparts of the Sundance Film Festival, right? It's like you, it's in another universe. Your film went to Sundance and it may have even won the top prize there, right? Yeah. You know, certainly that was possible. But just amazing to have been a Sundance selection. And you were almost guaranteed to have your film distributed after Sundance.

Yeah. I remember talking to our PR guy at the time and he watched the film and he said, um, cause he's, he's one of the top PR guys for documentaries and he does all the Oscar campaigns. And he's basically said, I've watched all the films at Sundance cause everyone's trying to get him to rep their film. And he only takes on a handful of them. I watched all the film at Sundance and yours was the one that actually has, has just stuck

with me. I just, I still think about it now. And he was talking about like, you know is gonna be an oscar film you're gonna you're gonna be we're gonna do an oscar campaign for this film and it's that it's that kind of like it's it's a kind of film that you watch and you just it just sticks with you which is the kind of film that usually gets at least shortlisted or nominated for an oscar and it was at the time i was like this will never get nominated for an Oscar because I'm sure there's a lot of people who aren't gonna like this film.

But again, from the right, it was funny because when that same guy, who was our PR guy, about four days after the announcement at Sundance, when the initial vitriol started, he called me and he said, I think you should pull the film out of Sundance. And this is the very, very, very beginning. And I was so taken aback by this i was like what are you talking about like this is this is the golden ticket like we can get through this and he was like my advice for you is to pull the film from sundance and at the time i just thought like like you're my pr guy

your job is to help me handle this and then then months later, I talked to him, because obviously hindsight's 2020. And I was like, what did you know then that I did not know? Because I didn't know it was going to get this bad. And he said something to me. He said, these last couple of years, I've worked on some films where they were directors who weren't of the community that the film was about. And I've seen them be attacked and it's relentless and i just didn't want to do it again he worked on a film i guess and an activist group went after that film just for the whole entire year was on the film festival circuit and he's just like i didn't i didn't want to do that again it's fucking exhausting he's like and your film really did change the industry to where the conversations that i'm having now is both film festivals and

buyers are very hesitant to take films that are directed by people not from that community because of the jihad rehab effect is what he kind of termed it as and I was like wow that's pretty alarming but yeah yeah that is what's so insidious about this it's just I mean there are people walking around thinking that cancellation really isn't a thing, right? That it's always... I was one of those people. I feel like shit now because I definitely heard people talking about... Before this, I heard people talking about cancellation. And I, having not been through it, I was just like, oh, some people are mean to you on Twitter.

You know, broke, thick in your skin. And I only thought that cancellation happened to famous people. Cause that's the only people I heard about, right. I heard about Joe Rogan. I heard about Dave Chappelle, you know, Louis CK and all that kind of stuff.

And, uh, I, I did not know. I didn't know what it was in its entirety. And I didn't know how devastating it is if you're a working class person, right? Like if you don't have a war chest, if you don't, if you cannot hire the PR team and do all this, like it's impossible to fight.

Like everyone was just like, why don't you put your story out there? Why don't you tell your side? I'm like, I've been trying for fucking months, but no journalist will talk to me and no one will publish anything. And unless you have the kind of war chest where you can hire a crisis pr team and lawyers and whatnot you can do like so for example there was a in initially there was a an article in documentary magazine that was written by one of the people attacking the film and there was i counted there was 42 factual errors in it and i

send that to our pr person at the time and they're like you cannot cannot put all these in the request to change because basically they would have to change the whole entire article so like pick the 10 most egregious things and we'll send them the stuff to like either retract it or correct it and one of the lines in the article was and i quote the men profess their innocence throughout the entire film. And I was like, dude, if you watch the first two minutes of the film, you know that's not true. And because you have Khalid talking about building bombs for Al-Qaeda and teaching people how to make bombs. And so we wrote Documentary Magazine to correct it. And they didn't. And it's still in

there today. And so we made them aware of this factual inaccuracy. And to me, that said one of two things, the writer either didn't see the film or pretend they did, or they did see the film. And again, they're not a journalist, they're just an activist, and they're trying to paint a picture of the film that's not true. And the thing that was really harmful is those publications are taken at face value with their facts. And so when you have a publication like that, writing about your film in that way, I think that was one of the huge things that was the nail in the coffin of this film to where you have false things being written about the film, putting out on blast and email blast on these publications. And then you have an entire community come after you because they think that you've made a film that is one thing when it's

actually not and so fast forward a couple of months we had an article done in the guardian about us that was completely false and like they said you know the men's lives were in danger and that the um that i had done all this really unethical stuff like they said in the article that i i hadn't contacted their lawyers first of all they don't have lawyers why they're in Saudi Arabia, but I actually did reach out to all three of the men's lawyers, and I heard back from two. I had long conversations with two of them, but there was all these really inaccurate factual things. I told the Guardian, listen, I'd really like to have a conversation with you, the journalist, and the editor-in-chief,

because you're writing things that aren't true. And I'd like to give you this interview. So you get all the facts. And the guardian said, no, like literally they said, we want you to answer in writing these like six questions. We're not going to give you the interview. And if you don't answer these six questions within 24 hours, this is the paragraph we're going to put out. Was the organization CAGE at all involved in engineering? Yeah, so there are two, yeah, there's two people attacking the film. One is a group of a handful of, oh, I didn't say this, I should have said this before, but later I found out through Sundance that the people who were initially attacking the film, there was like six Muslim filmmakers,

and they had written letters to Sundance kind of like pushing them to pull the film from the festival. Those people were also people who had applied to Sundance and not gotten in. And so there was a little bit of that going on. And it was like, you know, they think, I'm sure the thought was like, and I shouldn't say I'm sure their thought was because there's people tweeted this basically saying like, how dare Sundance program this person's film when my film as a Muslim would be way better to be programmed there. So I think there's some of that. That's related to Cage or that's related to. So, yeah, the other group is Cage. So I didn't know anything about Cage.

I never heard of Cage before this whole entire thing. Oh, Cage. Cage has covered itself in glory. this whole entire thing. Oh, KH has covered itself in glory. I mean, they're essentially a kind of stealth Islamist organization, I mean, pretending to be a Muslim civil rights organization, but they have said, basically, they keep alleging that every time a jihadist, a local jihadist in the UK becomes prominent in the news, the cause of that person's derangement is how they have, just what sort of mistreatment they've received at the hands of British society or the British government, right? So you have like, you know, Jihadi John, the poster boy for ISIS for a while, who was beheading Westerners in orange jumpsuits.

He was British and speaking with an English accent. And I think it was the head of CAGE, or certainly somebody from CAGE at the time, was on television talking about what a wonderful person this person actually was. And the only reason why he was standing in the desert in Syria or Iraq or wherever he was, was because he had been so mistreated by the British, the odious and Islamophobic British government. And so, yeah, so these are the people who are now condemning any film that even discusses the phenomenon of jihadism however sympathetically as your film does the way i think i think the way it was described to me so i i didn't know about cage at all before this and when when they initially started going after the film i didn't

i couldn't understand it because i was like why would a group of ex-guantanamo detainees not be in full support of this film because it really does not make guantanamo look great in fact my front one my one friend told me they're, if any film can get Guantanamo shut down, it's this one. So I didn't understand it first. And I started doing research on them. And then part of that research was, I mean, I'd sent the film to a lot of experts like Lawrence Wright and people who really know this subject quite well. my understanding after talking to them and doing a deep dive on the internet was cages pushing a narrative that basically says anyone in guantanamo or sorry every sorry everyone in guantanamo is completely innocent like they never did anything wrong

and they are completely just normal people who are just caught up in this and that is true for some people there are definitely people who were sent to Guantanamo who were just wrong place, wrong time and completely got fucked over by everything. But there are also people who weren't. And one of the things when I was interviewing all these guys, I did speak to people in Saudi Arabia who were, in my opinion, from talking to them, wrong place, wrong time. But I specifically chose people in my film who from their own volition talk about their involvement and with these organizations and so it was told to me that cage kind of pushes this narrative right that's saying everyone in guantanamo is completely

innocent and never did anything wrong and it's true like no one in guantanamo has actually been convicted i think that's pretty common knowledge but But then he said that any kind of narrative, any book or movie that challenges that narrative, they attack ferociously. And he said what's so damning about your film is on all these other documentaries and whatnot, you had people who were experts talking about you know these people in guantanamo but your film it's kind of from the horse's mouth these from men from their own like mouth tell you what they did and so it's really hard to argue that and so how they're kind of like shaping the narrative they're saying oh these men were forced to say that or like they didn't really do anything they're just being forced to to confess to these things and um and so so yeah so Cage kind of came.

They went really hard in the paint against the film. They did a lot of very shady things, including putting out lies about the film and about how the film was made and about the people in the film. And it's been very successful. It's been a very successful campaign. So when I talked about, about, I think right now, the criticism of the film has evolved over a course of time.

And right now, it's all about the men are in danger because of the film. Now, the film premiered in January. It's now October. I've been in contact with the guys throughout that entire time. I literally just got a message from one of them the other day, yesterday. And I don't know if you know about the Saudi government, but if the Saudi government was going to do something, they wouldn't have waited nine months to do it. And also these men are actually in a different class than your normal Saudi citizen. So what I mean by that is when they're released from Guantanamo, my understanding from talking to a lot of people who deal in this area

and who are Guantanamo experts are, if the men who are released from Guantanamo are sent to third-party nations, meaning they're countries that are not their own, there are some stipulations that have to be agreed to contractually between those two governments. One is you have to have a way to monitor these people, right? We just don't want to send them away and then release them back into the wild and let them do whatever they want and not know about it. The second thing is they have to have a way to reintegrate them back into society, whatever that is, if that's counseling, if that's job opportunities or whatever form that takes. if that's counseling, if that's job opportunities or whatever form that takes. And the third thing is that country has to promise not to torture or kill these people once they're handed over.

Because it would be a really bad look if we just handed someone over to, let's say, Saudi Arabia, and then they just beheaded them the next day. It wouldn't look good on us. So these guys are actually given a little bit more protection than your average citizen because they're not really allowed to torture or kill them contractually. I'm not saying that that's not possible, but it's just something that is actually part of the agreement of taking these men in. So what are the options for the film going forward? I mean, you've hit several brick walls, but what can you do to get this film distributed?

I mean, there's one option presents itself. You mentioned Louis C.K. at one point, and he's quite famously rebooted his career by simply releasing his material on his own website, right? He had a sufficient platform from which to do that. But you're now on this podcast. I know people. You, I'm sure, know other people. I know no. Sam, I'm a nobody. I know a handful of people. Well, there's some scenario where you could get just a grassroots response by just releasing this film. You could sell it from a website for $9.99 and some considerable number of people would download it. That's one way to distribute it without relying on a distributor. And there's everything from that to eventually getting it

on Netflix or some other platform by just persuading the people who need to be that that would maybe give some of the distributors like netflix or hulu or hbo that would maybe give them the courage they need to maybe not buy the film but at least give it give it a fair shake or you know a second look or first look if they didn't see it already at sundance unfortunately Unfortunately, that has not happened. And that's been pretty devastating because when you're talking about, because the second option is like, okay, if a traditional distributor with those kinds of resources is not going to pick up your film, then the backup plan would be self-distribution. And I have since talked to some people in the film industry who've done self-distribution and they all kind of said the same thing. They said that you need a team to be having a badass trailer which costs anything between 12 and 25 000 to get made

and then you're going to have to have a poster and you have to hire a legal team to basically put all these contracts together when you're doing self-distribution. And then it's quite involved with both people and resources. And it's definitely been done before by a lot of people self-distribute, but it's not something that's cheap. And when I asked some people just the numbers that they were giving me for like the trailers could be $25,000. The poster is a couple thousand dollars. And so that is all quite prohibitive to me because I don't have like I don't have Disney money. I don't have a war chest that I could just self distribute this and pay for all that myself, especially with all the credit card debt that I've managed to rack up. But I also feel like for me, this film is so important that it needs to get out there. So I'm still kind of trying. So like the other day, I made a GoFundMe page for the film to try to raise money for a trailer and a poster and just doing all this stuff because I do think that the film has had such a impact on people.

So that's one thing I'm like, I haven't given up. I'm still chipping away at it. So for example, when a film gets into Sundance, because it's considered the It Film Festival, it gets into almost invited to just loads of other ones. And to Oscar qualify a film, you need to do one of two things. You need to win an award at a film festival, which we were probably going to do because most films that get into Sundance wind up winning awards at some festival. And so they're automatically qualified to be considered for the Oscars. The other way to do it is to four wallet, which costs a lot of money. It's basically you have to play the film and rent a theater out for a week in one of, I think it's like four or

five cities. And you have to play the entire week in that theater, has to play three times a day. And that could be anywhere from like 15 to $20,000, which again, I don't have. But for me, it was imperative to Oscar qualify the film because I hate rewarding bad behavior and I hate bullies. And I didn't want to cede any ground to these people who had taken away the film's festival run, i.e. then it's Oscar qualifying chances. So I was able to find a theater in LA who I think took pity on me. And it's like some obscure place, like I think Glendale or something. And they agreed to rent me the theater for a week for $4,000. So I was able to raise that money to do that, to Oscar qualify it so i'm chipping away at this but it's like

what's that triad it's like cheap fast good pick two and right and so to self-distributive film when you're talking about oscar qualifying it when you're talking about posters when you're talking about hiring lawyers when you're talking about building a website, all of these things take time and resources and bodies. And right now, pretty much everyone's left the project and it's just me. So like the other day, I made the website for the film. And then the other day, I made a GoFundMe page to try to start raising money to... Where is the GoFundMe page? I just want to look at that too. Yeah, it's, if you go to my website, gheadrehab.com and you click donate, it then takes you to the GoFundMe page.

And we have $3,000 so far, which is, that's enough for a post. We can get a poster made basically is what we're at. So we're chipping away. We can hire someone to design a poster for the film. And then, so here I have like what happened to the, what we're at so we're chipping away you can hire someone to design a poster for the film and then so here i have like what happened to the like a little bit about the film a link to new york times article and then i have my director's statement which is why i made the film which

i wasn't really sure i wanted to put up there because it's pretty personal but i was like if i'm asking people for money i should probably tell them who i am because i'm this it literally is sam it's just me like. I literally taught myself how to build a website a couple of weeks ago. Let's just assume those problems could go away quickly. Then what do you want to do? Are there any reasons not to self-distribute if all of the hassle can be removed? The only big thing about self-distribution not being Louis C.K., he has a built-in audience that will religiously buy his stuff and view it, as does Andrew Schultz, who has quite a big following now. And no one's ever fucking heard of me. I have zero following other than my uncles and aunts.

I'm sure they donate to the go fund me page but you're never going to get as many eyeballs on a film that's that's self-distributed unless you're like the kind of louis ck name and that's the one downside and does it prevent later distribution on netflix or some other platform i mean is there any negative yeah so basically like, the GoFundMe page I made was for to be able to self distribute the film to at least a couple of cities and theaters, because twofold. Number one, when I was talking about Oscar qualifying the film, you have to Oscar qualify the film and run it in a theater before you put it online. If you put it online before you put it in the theater, then it disqualifies for the oscars that's one which i'm doing in this month anyway so this month there's it's going to play for a week in glendale okay two is i wanted to be able to have people go see the film for themselves in a way that like i could do like i didn't building a website and putting all that stuff up it makes it more accessible but being able to just put it in theaters and if you still keep and let's say

it does really well in theaters and you still keep the streaming and broadcast rights then maybe a distributor like Netflix like oh shit a lot of people are seeing this maybe we do want it on our site and so to kind of keep that hold that that close to the chest, strategically, that's what I was thinking. But seeing the people's reaction to the New York Times, the kind of silence that has come from the distributors made me lose, I'm starting to lose faith that that could be turned around. and why I'm going to self-distribute now is because I think that's the only way at this point to get out there unless something changes. But if this goes into theaters, if I'm able to like, let's say play it in like five or 10 cities and it does really well,

then typically the eyes and the ears of the bigger distributors where it could get a bigger audience will perk up. But yeah, I mean, I i just my goal with this film is to twofold number one to get my investors back their money and two more importantly for me though is to have as many people see it as possible and the reason why i'm still kind of holding out for like a netflix or hbo to take it because i know it's going to 10, 100 times more people will see it on Netflix than if I have it on my own website, unfortunately. Okay. Well, I really do want to help you. It's

still not totally clear how I should go about doing that, but because you have this GoFundMe page and this process has started, a very clear way I can help you is just to give you money there, which I'm going to do. And I'm going to advocate that my audience do likewise if they have found this conversation compelling. I'm already kind of like really humbled that you're even talking to me because I know the people that you talk to on your podcasts are really well-known, very respected people in their fields. And I feel like I'm like a street urchin compared to them. So just coming on here and talking to you has been a really

very humbling experience. And so, yeah, thank you for that. That's really touching. Thank you. Yeah. Well, I mean, you're obviously an extraordinary person, but I didn't quite know that until we had this conversation. But there's the film itself and the extraordinary injustice of its cancellation. And there's just so much about this situation that reveals what is wrong in our culture at the moment. I mean, there's just the failures of courage, great and small, the righteous dishonesty that is being aimed at you. And you've got people changing movie reviews that were once effusive and now no longer are. You've got supporters who are defecting and giving no rational account of what has changed to explain their behavior. It is the whole shebang in microcosm that people have been

worrying about for years now. Can I say something about that, about the worrying for years thing? It's because I did see some of this, a little bit of this in the broadcast world and in the studio world when it came to advertisers being skittish about certain topics. And one of the reasons why I operate in the independent space is because I believe that we were above that and immune to it because just the fact that we're independent and like Sundance has garnished a reputation for playing films that are hard and difficult and controversial and platforming those films just for the main reason that they would never get made in a studio environment. And so for me, I mean, Sundance has been around for decades. And for Sundance to apologize for this film, not once, but twice.

Yeah, it's extraordinary. It's a kind of a come to Jesus moment for me, to be honest, because they are the premier institution in my little world, my fishbowl of independent documentary films. And people like Abigail Disney are leaders in that world. who have felt the pressure and apologized and kind of did the mea culpa and moved on. And some of them should have apologized and some of them definitely shouldn't have, but it was always perceived that that's what you do. And I didn't realize, I think, the extent of it until I felt it. And then I think for me, because I had a lot of people on my team pressuring me to apologize. And I asked them, what am I apologizing for? They said, it didn't matter, but you need to show some kind of apology and humility otherwise they're just going to keep

on coming after you and at that time I was just like listen like when you're a firefighter and you arrive on scene you don't just run into the building you kind of have to assess first and at the time I was trying to gather information because what was happening was completely, didn't make sense to me because of all the screens we'd done before the festival. And so originally I didn't apologize because I was trying to understand and grasp what was happening.

And then when I kind of did really understand it, I thought, no, like I had sent my film to Lawrence Wright and Ali Soufan. I had screened my film post Sundance with Muslim people, leaders in the community in the Bay area. I screened it with a Yemeni student union and they all had pretty positive reactions to it. So I was like,

what am I, I don't think I've done anything wrong here. Cause I did vet it post Sundance. Cause when you get that kind of reaction, unless you like, I just thought I have to do my due diligence maybe i did miss something and it was the same kind of reactions we got pre-sundance and so when it came down to it it's like okay you took my film's premiere away from me you took the

film's trajectory away from me you took my reputation and my name and my career away from me like fuck am i gonna give you my integrity, the one thing I have left, and apologize for this film and basically reinforce the lies you're telling about this film. And it literally was... The reason why I didn't apologize is because after I did my due diligence, it was the only thing I had left. I didn't have money, I didn't have my reputation,

I didn't have my career. The only thing I had was my integrity. And for me, it was worth holding on to for that. And I think someone told me, you know, about like all these big institutions like Sundance and Abigail Disney kind of bending the knee to this angry mob and to the pressure. And that then it falls on, like, i hate the fact that i'm the first one in my industry not to apologize like i it should not be a first-time feature filmmaker that is doing this it's really hard i don't have the resources i don't have the track record i don't have the kind of like cool and i i am like the least least powerful person in my industry and least amount of influence. And I hate the fact that other people before me who had way more resources and way more power could have done this before me and hopefully set the groundwork for other people to do it.

But unfortunately, it falls on me. And I think I'm reminded of like, I heard this somewhere. And they said, the only thing more dangerous than a man with limitless resources and more money than God is a man with nothing to lose. At this point, I got fucking nothing to lose. So I guess I'm like, I'm not apologizing. What are you going to take from me? I'm literally moving out of my house in a couple of months because I can no longer afford it. So I just, I don't want this to be like a woe is me thing because I do think the film for me is something I'm super proud of. People who worked on it, super proud of, and I want to pay those people back. And also those people's careers, like the animation in the film. I mean, we didn't talk about that, but it's fucking awesome.

Yeah. Like if you, if you watch other documentaries, they don't, there's, they don't have, I that but it's fucking awesome yeah like if you if you watch other documentaries they there's they don't have i mean it's a really good animation and all the animators in the film are women we we didn't have a lot of resources so my co-producer literally went on instagram and i said my only stipulation is i want all female animators i don't care where they're at what the background is but i really wanted all female animators. I don't care where they're at or what the background is, but I really wanted all female animators because our production team in the field had to be all male because of just the, there were certain things that I couldn't shoot on my own. Like, so for example, the wedding

that you saw, the wedding scene, the film, weddings in Saudi Arabia are segregated. So I wasn't allowed to film the wedding. So I had to be in the parking lot in a car with a remote director's monitor and a walkie talkie and directing the cinematographer and the sound guy remotely on like who to film and who to zoom into. And so because we had to have an all male production team, it was imperative to me to have more females involved in posts. And so we had all I think we had six female animators two were from they had they just started this animation company in brazil called hilda motion and it was the one year of

their opening their company these two girls from brazil was going to be the premiere at sundance and it was going to launch their company and launch their career and they were so excited about it and they were just like you can't believe that we did an animation piece that's going to be a film at Sundance. And it was going to launch their business because it's really good animation in there. And there was another woman who, she's a trans woman in London

who does animation on the side. And she did the line animation. And all these people, there was one of my favorite stories about the animators is there was one woman that i interviewed and then months later we were talking after the animation windows and she did she did an otters animation the one that's kind of like charcoal hand-drawn type stuff and when i interviewed her she made she made it seem like she'd been in the industry for a while but i was

mostly sold on her pitch and her, she got the characters. Like, so for me, it was more important that they understood the psychology of the characters and they were able to express that visually than like any kind of awards they won. And so later on after the film was done, she was like, Meg, I have a confession to make. And I was like, yeah. So do you remember when did the interview and I was telling you like, you know, was a professional animator and I was like yeah I was like okay and she's like well you remember that time when you were trying to get a hold of me and you couldn't it took me a long time to get back to you I'm like yeah she goes well it's because I'm actually still in school and I'm you and I had finals week and she's like I've actually this is my first paid gig

I'm like I don't fucking care dude it was great I mean so it was the moral of the story is like it was a lot of people's I mean I am not I am not a big wig in our industry I'm not a gatekeeper but I was a gatekeeper for this film and it was imperative to me to find other people that were also talented that just hadn't got the recognition yet and this was going to launch their careers as well and so one of the cinematographers I worked with like literally I saw him the other day and he was saying like you know a bunch of the people who were on this film who've moved on like the you know bigger wigs where he was hanging around the other day and he's just like you know they all moved on to the other projects he's like this was supposed to be my big shot like this was like the

the one that was going to put me on the map and so i'm really sad because by going after me i don't think they realize they really hurt other people who would be in the minority camp right the like trans woman in in the uk the the brazilian couple in the couple in brazil the women in brazil and there was one in poland as well and i think that like all these people were at the nascent stage of their career they just hadn't got the acknowledgement yet but they're all super fucking talented and it's just really sad to me because it's not how it's supposed to go this isn't how you know and i think for me it's hard because it, the hardest thing about this whole ordeal was this was a project that had no resources for what we actually pulled off. And there was a lot of people who worked for free or deferred or for a huge discount. And they followed me down this path because they believed in me and they believed in this project.

this path because they believed in me and they believed in this project and what was absolutely devastating for me is when this all started kicking off and they were attacked on social media and they were bullied and harassed and like we had like we had people who so just to let you know they took screenshots of our credits at Sundance and they reached out to a lot of the people at our credits and they threatened them and they like let me see if I don't know if I have it here yeah so here we go so this is one of the emails I got from one of the people in our credits so basically somehow they got her phone number and they called her and this is the email she said she's like oh I'm sorry if my tone was harsh because she sent me an email before and she said my phone was blowing up with strangers asking me about the film which I haven't seen yet saying that I supported Islamophobia and

endangered people I felt as blindsided as I sounds you are now and now I'm hearing people are being fired and resigning I'm so sorry about all of this for everyone I've been in firestorms before and you will get through this because you're talented, resilient, and not ill-intentioned. I'd never survive in your industry. That was just one person on our credits that they reached out to and basically on the phone was like, you're a racist and you're Islamophobic unless you take your name off the film. And so she asked me to take her name off the film. And we had like, I think it was like 35 people or something in total that reached out and said, please take my name with the film. I literally got one just yesterday from a guy who's pretty high up in the industry. And these people aren't in the credits. They're in

our special thanks. And he said, take my name off your special thanks. And it's not like we're giving you a credit that you didn't do. It's just like, Hey, thank you for working on our film. And they reached, reached out to all those people and, and harassed them and, and bullied them. And then they contacted me and said, I don't want to be associated with this film anymore because it's just causing me too much of a headache. And that's hard when you're like the captain of the ship, right? And people trust you and they follow you down a path and then you lead into the path where it devastates their career it caused them emotional strife like I had one of my editors calling me on the phone and she was just like she was distraught and she was

crying and I felt like like I don't know if it's the firefighter in me but they were like my team and I couldn't protect them. And I felt responsible for that. Cause like they'd followed me down this line. Shit. Sorry. Hold on. They'd followed me down this line,

um, in this path in this film because they believed in me and they trusted me. And because of that, their lives were kind of blown up too so that was the worst part feeling responsible for other people's for other people like that translator being attacked or like my editor or my cinematographer or my you might the guy who did our score he said he had five different people call him encouraging him to take his name off the film and he didn't he he asked he asked each one of them what his name off the film. And he didn't.

He asked each one of them what they thought of the film. He said none of them had seen the film. Every single person that called him had not seen the film. So it's just been this total avalanche and wave of, like I said before, I didn't understand what cancellation really was until I went through this process. And that's why I wouldn't wish this on my worst enemy. the people attacking the film. I wouldn't wish this on them. No one deserves this. And I think that the documentary field is filled with a lot of really good intentioned people. And I think that it's also really easy to weaponize empathy when you're in that kind of field. And I'm sure there are people out there who saw the film and genuinely didn't like it. And that's fine. And I'm sure there are people out there who saw the film and genuinely didn't like

it. And that's fine. And I'm open to criticism. But there's a difference between criticism and bullying, between criticism and harassment and threatening lawsuits and things like that. lawsuits and things like that. So I'm hoping that if I can turn this around, that it will kind of be a moment in my industry where we can take a step back and say, hey, we need to kind of reevaluate how we're dealing with all this. And the knock on effect is, if you have a film festival as powerful as Sundance capitulating, then eventually what's going to happen is people are only going to program safe films, which don't talk about the issues and don't talk about the stuff that's actually hard to talk about, which we need to do. And that's why we all operate in this independent space because we're able to, I don't know, have you ever seen that film,

Act of Killing? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Brilliant film. Brilliant. Yeah. In fact, I had the director on the podcast. Okay. Yeah. He's so sweet. He's such a nice man. But that film would never have gotten made in a studio. No fucking way. Yeah.

But the great thing about the independent space, it used to be that there are people who realized that this was the space where you made challenging work so you can have those difficult discussions. But if this space now has been infected with this kind of propensity to play it safe and to avoid conflict then i don't there's no other space for it like there's no other plan c like this was the space where films like that got made and got platformed and without that i'm very fearful of moving like where my industry is headed. The avoidance of controversy is just a disaster for honest inquiry and entertainment.

And we all make mistakes. And then when you do actually make a mistake and it's brought to your attention, you sure shit should apologize and do it in a very genuine way. And for me, that's face to face. For me, that's in person. It's not performative. And the fact that there I've seen other filmmakers apologize and I see the work they're apologizing for and I just it baffles me.

But I understand. I understand why now, because the. Well, they just want to make it stop. Yeah. You just want you want to get your life back. And as you say, your reputation back. But you certainly have your integrity and your intentions are so obvious and obviously good. Let's see if we can get the other stuff back because what's happened to you here is deeply unfair.

And I want to help. I want my audience to help. um well you and i'll stay connected and just let me know what happens but one thing that's potentially confusing is you've changed the name of the film in the meantime so you it's now called the unredacted but the website is jihad rehab and that's not going to change yeah the website's jihad rehab.com if you put in the unredacted film i think it will still you there. But there's a lot of websites with the unredacted in it. So we didn't want there to be confusion. But the title, yes, the title is The Unredacted, but it's jihadrehab.com. Yeah, so jihadrehab.com. Donate. And I hope people do because we should help you. Meg, thanks for your time. And please keep your chin up. It's not over.

Thank you. I appreciate it. And thank you for, I don't know how long we've been talking, but it's been a while. It's been a joy to have this long overdue conversation with you. So I appreciate it. Thank you. you