Through interviews conducted with incarcerated fighters of the armed group Islamic State, Rojek shows the human face of jihad and the life that is trying to resume in Syrian Kurdistan.
Will the fire that ignited Syria ever be extinguished? Nothing is less certain, suggests director Zaynê Akyol with Rojek. Flames are still burning in the Levant and it takes more than an army to extinguish an idea like religious fundamentalism.
“It’s like a plate of glass,” said a veteran of the armed group Islamic State (IS). When you break it, it multiplies. The man’s tone isn’t even threatening. He simply expresses his vision of things, as a dozen men (especially) and women will do in this second film where, after Gulistan, land of rosesZaynê Akyol recounts the war and its scars in Syrian Kurdistan.
The approach is stripped down: each of the interviewees faces the camera, their face tightly framed, and tells their story. We don’t know anything about these people, neither their names, nor their ages, nor the acts for which they were imprisoned. Only that they were members of ISIS. We will only know of them what they will agree to tell about their participation in the war and the reasons why they chose to leave Europe (for many) and to go and fight in Syria in the name of a certain vision of Islam. Neither the camera nor the interviewer are there to judge them, but to understand.
These interviews form the backbone of the film, broken down by scenes of a strange post-war life (checkpoint, military training, farming under surveillance, daily life in a prison camp) and superb shots shot on camera. using drones. And this is the great strength of Rojek than to give to hear the simple soldiers of Allah, who had faith in the caliphate that the EI dreamed of establishing. Some still believe it is possible. Others think they are wrong.
Zaynê Akyol advances with great tact, manages to establish a very frank contact with his subjects, who sometimes open up more than they had expected. Her approach is transparent: she subtly shows the viewer the underside of her approach, as when she preserves on a black background an exchange with an interviewee who says that she did a second take so that she can clearly express her thoughts. .
We can criticize the director for not giving enough information about the places or the people she is filming. This vagueness is sometimes annoying as it leaves questions unanswered. However, it has the advantage of showing that, basically, the horrors of war are experienced far beyond Syria. And that these anonymous men and women are proof that horror is human.
Rojek is presented in the original version in Arabic, English, French and Kurdish with French subtitles.
Indoors
Documentary
Rojek
Zayne Akyol
2:08 a.m.