Also Known As Jihadi
The possible story of a man, Aziz, told through the landscapes he traversed: the clinic where he was born in the Parisian suburb of Vitry, the neighbourhoods he grew up in, his schools, university and workplaces. Then, his departure to Egypt, Turkey and the road to Aleppo where he joined the ranks of the al-Nusra Front in 2012. A journey tracked by a second storyline, made of extracts from judicial records: police interrogations, wiretaps, surveillance reports… Documents, like pages from a script, intertwined with images and sounds to compose a film that pertains less to a singular character, Aziz, than to the architectural, political, social and judicial landscapes in which his story unfolds.
| Directors | Éric Baudelaire, Éric Baudelaire |
| Actor | Terence Chotard |
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In chronicling the journey of a French jihadist based solely on the landscapes supposedly traversed since his birth – from the Parisian suburbs to the Al-Nusra Front in Syria – filmmaker Eric Baudelaire explores, from territory to territory, the difficulty of deciphering the material of reality, social and political, at the origin of the terrorist trajectory.
The fascinating interest of his film partly lies elsewhere. By confronting the "landscape theory" of Marxist filmmaker Masao Adachi with the relentless judicial documents after the protagonist's arrest, the filmmaker gradually erects the fundamental gap between the fantasized daily life of the journey and its impending indictment.
Like a slow suspense, the film then takes the form of this unfolding, between the idealized time of departure and the unfinished and disappointed time of return. In between, Also Known As Jihadi conveys a precious sense of loss and failure, aptly questioning the limits of a procedural determinism that judges but struggles here to understand.
Terence Chotard
Filmmaker
-
Français
1h42
Language: Français -
English
1h42
Language: English
- Année 2017
- Pays France
- Durée 102
- Producteur Poulet-Malassis
- Langue French
- Sous-titres English
- Résumé court Through documents and landscapes, we witness the journey of a French-Algerian man into a jihadist network in Syria.
- Mention festival Best Feature Award - Festival dei Popoli 2017
- Ordre 4
In chronicling the journey of a French jihadist based solely on the landscapes supposedly traversed since his birth – from the Parisian suburbs to the Al-Nusra Front in Syria – filmmaker Eric Baudelaire explores, from territory to territory, the difficulty of deciphering the material of reality, social and political, at the origin of the terrorist trajectory.
The fascinating interest of his film partly lies elsewhere. By confronting the "landscape theory" of Marxist filmmaker Masao Adachi with the relentless judicial documents after the protagonist's arrest, the filmmaker gradually erects the fundamental gap between the fantasized daily life of the journey and its impending indictment.
Like a slow suspense, the film then takes the form of this unfolding, between the idealized time of departure and the unfinished and disappointed time of return. In between, Also Known As Jihadi conveys a precious sense of loss and failure, aptly questioning the limits of a procedural determinism that judges but struggles here to understand.
Terence Chotard
Filmmaker
-
Français
Duration: 1h42Language: Français1h42 -
English
Duration: 1h42Language: English1h42
- Année 2017
- Pays France
- Durée 102
- Producteur Poulet-Malassis
- Langue French
- Sous-titres English
- Résumé court Through documents and landscapes, we witness the journey of a French-Algerian man into a jihadist network in Syria.
- Mention festival Best Feature Award - Festival dei Popoli 2017
- Ordre 4
