Sometimes the simplest scenes are the hardest to come by, as Zaynê Akyol would find out in making “Rojek.” The filmmaker had seemingly pulled off the impossible already in “Gulîstan, Land of Roses,” her 2016 feature in which she embedded with female freedom fighters from the Kurdistan Workers’ Party (PKK) as they defended their land from growing presence of ISIS. Aykol went back to the region her family fled when she was a young child to try to understand what it meant to fight on the front lines as a fellow refugee from their adopted hometown of Montreal left for the war, though as the filmmaker chronicled the physically and emotionally wrenching experience of confronting ISIS on the battlefield, she sought a way to show the conflict in an entirely different way by seeking an understanding of the beliefs that compelled ISIS to continue their attacks.
The set-up of “Rojek,” which was recently selected by Canada as their official entry to this year’s Oscars, couldn’t be any more direct, having currently incarcerated members of the Islamic State speak straight into the camera about their lives and ultimately their radicalization, offering chilling testimony about their crimes and their justifications that run the gamut from the supernatural involving exorcisms and djinns to the terrifyingly mundane and the need to satiate an enormous amount of anger and frustration. However, Akyol would need to surpass a number of obstacles in order to gain access to such subjects, first having to obtain permission to film inside three prisons where some of the highest ranking members of the Islamic State were held after the collapse of the caliphate in 2019 and even observes some of them sit trial for their crimes. Yet getting the kind of clearance that only Secret Service officials generally have may have been less of a challenge in retrospect than subsequently navigating incredibly difficult conversations where as deeply entrenched as these ISIS members’ beliefs are, the director is still able to stir up some real soul-searching as she sits across from them.
The film is bound to stir up just as much for those watching it as Akyol observes how ISIS has drawn members from around the world with its extreme fundamentalist interpretations of Islam and the conversations are presented amidst scenes from the land that has been ravaged as a result of the war, now largely absent of civilians. Yet in places rendered uninhabitable, Akyol finds the world we all live in now where the lure of tearing down societies competes with the belief in building and protecting them and with the two films she’s devoted the last decade of her life to shows the full spectrum of the human capacity for both. Recently when “Rojek” made its U.S. premiere at DOC NYC, Akyol graciously took the time to talk about how one film led to another, allowing her subjects to express themselves fully without amplifying their views and the practical demands of such a complicated production.
This seems to be connected to your previous film “Gulistan,” though after being out in the field, it feels like it couldn’t be any more different as you sit in prisons interviewing these members of the Islamic State. How did this come about?
Actually, it’s the continuation of “Gulistan,” but let me start from the beginning. I’m originally Kurdish, and I’m from a small village in Turkey. My family immigrated [to Canada] when I was four-and-a-half, and as you know, most of the Kurds are facing elimination for over a century in Turkey, Iran, Iraq and Syria where they were bombed, killed, imprisoned. It was even forbidden to speak Kurdish in Turkey. That’s why we immigrated to Montreal, and suddenly we had this new freedom to express who we are. We used to gather in a small Kurdish community center [where] I met Gulistan, a young, beautiful woman who used to babysit me when my parents were working and one day, she disappeared from my life without saying goodbye. I learned that she joined the PKK, the guerrilla fighters, and in 2000, she died, but she was very important to me and she was always in my mind.
When I studied cinema, I decided to make a film about her and why she decided to leave Montreal, and more than that, I wanted to try to understand what happened to her because she had a very tragic destiny. She died in 2000 as a guerrillero. When my team and I arrived in Iraqi Kurdistan on August 3rd, 2014, it was the exact same day that the Islamic State attacked the Kurdish region, so thousands of people were running away towards the north, towards Turkey to escape the war. Obviously, it was not possible to make the film that I had in mind because most of the women that knew Gulistan was busy fighting ISIS, and some died, and some even were not with the PKK anymore. So I did a first film about the women that were training in the mountains of Kurdistan and then, I filmed them in the towns in the war zone, facing ISIS. And unfortunately, most of the women that I filmed died while fighting ISIS and also many Kurds died because when ISIS attacked the region, the Iraqi and Syrian armies ran away, and the majority of people who stood against the Islamic States were Kurds, so not only I lost my people, but I also lost those women who were friends.
[“Rojek”] became my way of facing the people who were directly or indirectly responsible for the death of my people and my friends, and it was also a way for me to grieve and understand how brainwashing works. How can you explain the violent act that you’re doing by a fundamentalist way of seeing religion? I wanted to understand the humans behind this barbaric war.
You’ve said you initially may have thought of following one person, so how did it expand into this idea of meeting with prisoners?
That’s true that at the beginning, one part of my [idea] was to film this Kurdish woman who was responsible for all the military operations in Raqqa, the capital of the Islamic State — a kind of Kurdish Che Guevara figure because it was very fascinating for me to imagine a woman in charge of a whole army in the Middle East who was doing the operation on the ground and against the Islamic State. But when we arrived in Syria with my team, it was not possible because at that time Turkey was threatening to attack Syrian Kurdistan, so they were busy to secure their borders, and obviously, it was too dangerous for us to go there. So I focused more on the scenes where I was facing jihadists of the Islamic State. In my treatment, I wrote some scenes like that, but I was not sure if it was possible in reality because no other filmmakers have had access to the jails where they are detained, especially those jails where they detain the most important ISIS members. It’s very typical of any film that is happening in a war zone that the scenes you are planning never happen in the way that you’re planning because every day the situation on the ground changes.
Even after you get access to the prisons, how do you end up securing the participation of those incarcerated there in the film?
I met over a hundred ISIS members and half of them didn’t want to have any interview with me. I was very honest, telling them who I am and what I did as a filmmaker. I explained that previously I did a film about the Kurdish women fighters who fought them and they knew I was obviously from the West because I was speaking French and English with my crew and Kurdish with the guards and in the process of making this film, I was also grieving. It was the very beginning of the end of the war, so I was very affected by that and there were no other way of doing this film than being honest.
So half of the people that I met didn’t accept and the people who did accept to be in the film, I would [spend] one hour with them before even starting to film, explaining to them what kind of question I [would ask] and the mechanics of the interviews because I didn’t want to edit their speech. I wanted to stay as close as possible to the real time interviews. All my questions were very similar for everyone — I had [about] 20 questions, and depending on who they were, I would shape my questions differently [based] on what they did or their importance [to the Islamic State]. If it’s a gun maker, then I would ask more about that. If they were a chief of a whole province, which was the case in one of the interview, I would ask questions about the army and how the decisions were taken. But I would always start with their personal life — where they grew up, what was their family situation — and I would give them some directions [before going on camera], for example, one minute per question, looking at the lens, and they could just not answer or redo their responses if they wanted.
We can see it in the film also [when] the French woman is asking me which was the best take. It [became] a way for them to show they didn’t change their mind [about their beliefs]. In the case of the woman who is speaking French, she wanted to make sure that if there is a high ranking ISIS member that is seeing her, they would know that she didn’t change her mind because she was also one of the most important people in ISIS. She was number eight in the hierarchy, and was there with the fundamentalists in Bosnia and Afghanistan and in the close circle of Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. Her husband was in part responsible for the bombing in the Metro of London and in Spain, respectively in 2004 and 2005. In Saudi Arabia, he died in a clash with the police after an attack he did to the residences of the international ambassadors. She was well-known from ISIS. Some of these interviewees I saw for a week and some two or three days and sometimes after one interview, there was not much [more] to say, so it really depended on the person.
This film navigates that question of depiction not being endorsement beautifully while you show Islamic State members who remain stedfast in their beliefs. Was it difficult to figure out how to let them express themselves without giving them a platform?
Before interviewing them, if I knew they wanted to be part of the film, I would watch the propaganda video that they made in the Islamic State, just to make sure that I have the right distance because it’s a very strange thing to talk with ISIS member because at the end of the day, they seem very normal. You cannot guess by the appearance of someone that they killed a whole village, so I would watch all the propaganda videos that the Kurds had [from] when [Islamic State members] got captured, which I think it was not a good idea [for me personally] because it affected me a lot. Today I’m not able to watch anything violent. It’s too hard. But at that time, I thought it was the right thing to do and I had a very rigorous and ethical line that I wanted to follow.
This background of all the videos that I saw allowed me to have the right distance and [in conversation], I was just sticking to my questions and trying to understand what they were saying because to me, they are brainwashed [by the Islamic State], but do not forget that to them, I am brainwashed, so how is a conversation possible? They might be in jail but they certainly thought my mind was imprisoned, so I had to stick to the questions I had and tried to converse when possible. I was just trying to understand the connection they were making so I could ask the right questions. I was being the most honest possible, because anyway there’s no other way to make a film, especially on such a personal subject.
You actually show the arc of the war in the scenes that are intercut between the interviews that appear to be things you captured verite-style at the same time as you were conducting the interviews. At what point did you actually shoot that footage?
Actually, I waited for three years to go in because the border kept closing and opening and it was very hard for me to find a cinematographer to come with me. After thinking every six months that I would go, it never happened for three years and when I could go in, we got ready for everything because when you get in, it’s very hard also to get out. There is no shop if something breaks, and we had an Alexa ARRI Mini, and a 5D as a backup, and a drone. We spent five months in Syria, capturing footage of everything during that time. However, it became evident to me that the world of ISIS and those interviews did not encapsulate Syria. The coexistence of close-ups on faces and exterior scenes needed to feel instinctive with sharp cuts. The confined world of prisons should not contaminate the outside world, which belongs to the Syrians.
The structure of “Rojek” is that the core of the film are the interviews – and this is [reflecting] the world of ISIS and their [beliefs] — but whatever is outside it was about Syria and the people trying to reconstruct their country after so many years of war. I thought it’s interesting to always go from the micro to the macro to have a bigger view of the situation. These two scales, beside each other, make you realize much more than trying to explain to the viewers where we are. The faces say a lot about someone, and going from those close-ups to the life on the ground is almost philosophical in a way. When I was trying to imagine the film I was creating, I was always referring to the interviews for the scenes that could be [filmed] outside.
For example, if [the Islamic State members] are talking about the borders and how it was controlled and how people could get in so easily, then I was trying to find, “Okay, where are the borders and how are Kurds trying to manage it and how it is secure?” And if they’re talking about the selling of oil and petrol to different countries, I went and I tried to find an illegal refinery or even a legal one that the Kurds are controlling, so it was always the two worlds responding to each other but never interfering [with] each other.
It was powerfully done. What’s this past year been like for you traveling with it?
The premiere took place at Visions du Réel in Switzerland, generating significant interest due to the rare access we had. People were particularly intrigued by my unique perspective as a woman and a Kurd filming in the region during wartime. The experience sparked numerous questions, creating a platform for insightful discussions. Our film has since been featured in over 45 festivals and won 14 international awards, earning widespread recognition. Despite its challenging nature, the film has resonated deeply with audiences, illustrating the complexity of the situation. It doesn’t adhere to a simplistic black-and-white narrative; instead, it delves into nuanced aspects. Throughout the process, I was on a learning journey, leading to enriching conversations with viewers.
“Rojek” is now available to stream in the U.S. via Icarus Films.
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