Zaynê Akyol is fearless. After having accompanied the Kurdish fighters to the front against the armed group Islamic State in Gulistan, land of rosesnow she looks straight into the eyes of their enemy.
To realize Rojek, her most recent documentary, the young Montreal filmmaker spent five months in Syrian Kurdish territory and visited the prisons where dozens of terrorists implicated in crimes by the IS group languish. Of the hundred prisoners she has met, about fifteen appear in front of the camera. “I’m the only one who was able to meet them,” says the director of Kurdish origin born in Turkey. These jihadists, it was the Kurds who arrested them while they were fighting for their own territory on Syrian soil, she says.
Zaynê Akyol confirms it in an interview: this film was “difficult to make”. Not only logistically, but also morally. “I really positioned myself as a person who tries to understand and who had an attentive ear to what they were saying. At the same time, almost all the women I had done my previous film with had died fighting. And when you know people who died so violently, when you meet these criminals, it becomes emotionally difficult. »
Blood on the hands
At first, she says, she was trying to understand how and where the protagonists of Gulistan, land of roses were deceased. But the filmmaker in her has taken over. And throughout the film, his camera, which films his subjects in very close shots, essentially lingers to understand what they are saying, sometimes with the help of an interpreter.
Rojek opens with the testimony of a prisoner who tells how he went about hunting goldfinches in his youth, with a net and a radio to attract them. In an interview, Zaynê Akyol notes that this hunt appeared to him as a metaphor for their condition as trapped terrorists.
The jihadists that the filmmaker meets are not, however, altar boys. One of them himself shot videos of the execution of prisoners, which served as much to recruit troops as to scare the enemy. Most are men. Their wives and children are locked up in camps on the outskirts of the prison, as evidenced by certain women that Zaynê Akyol met, all dressed in black and veiled up to their eyes.
One woman, however, is herself in prison for her crimes. In front of the camera, she says that the two years she spent in the service of the EI group, in which she was highly placed, are “the best years of her life”. This woman is detained alone, explains the filmmaker, “because the Kurds are afraid that she will brainwash the other detainees”.
I want them to be tried by an international court. All governments are abdicating themselves [par rapport à ces criminels].
In any case, religious beliefs are on the edge of discourse. Many of the prisoners come from abroad. One of them says he came into contact with the jihadist group through a Turkish mosque in Germany, then passed through Turkey to enter Syria. A Syrian woman detained in a camp recounts how she was sold by her family to a man when she was only 13, to immediately become pregnant. The comments on the paradise promised to the martyrs are also disturbing. Men of course dream of divine landscapes where they are surrounded by available virgins. A woman – of Swedish origin, says Zaynê Akyol in an interview – says she dreams of living in a crystal house in paradise.
“Distinguishing the true from the false”
The filmmaker deliberately omitted to mention the names of the protagonists and the crimes for which they were imprisoned. It is true that this information, although relevant, would necessarily have colored the viewer’s gaze.
“I was the miscreant in front of them,” she says. Some prisoners she approached refused to give her an interview. “There is a blond, blue-eyed German who wouldn’t even look at me. He said it was a sin to look at a woman other than his own. Those who accepted did so for different reasons. Some saw it as an opportunity to spread their ideology or scare their opponents, she believes. “You have to be careful with what they say. You have to take it and leave it. »
She adds, however, that she let them say what they wanted, and that it will be up to the viewer to “discern right from wrong”.
Some of the prisoners met in Rojek have already been judged. But several have not had a trial, in particular because the Kurdish authorities have neither the infrastructure nor the personnel to organize them. And the countries of which they are nationals have not indicated their intention to repatriate them either, a process complicated by the fact that the Kurdish government is not recognized everywhere on the planet.
“I want them to be tried by an international court,” says Zaynê Akyol. “All governments are losing their responsibilities” in relation to these criminals, she laments.