"A Jihad For Love" Director Parvez Sharma (left) with Producer Sandi DuBowski. Photo by Peter Knegt/indieWIRE.
by Brian Brooks and Peter Knegt (September 13, 2007)
Defying tradition both openly and while hiding are at the root of two films screening here this week in Toronto. Parvez Sharma's "A Jihad for Love" takes a look at a segment of the planet's gays who are often left voiceless (along with those in other religious traditions). Exploring homosexual Muslims, the director said making the film was surprisingly abetted by the customs of Islam itself. And on the polar opposite spectrum, Doug Pray's "Surfwise" chronicles the rejection of the material world and the pursuit of great surf by one couple and their nine children who grew up living in a camper traveling from beach to beach in search of the perfect wave and perfect health.
Finding a new out in "A Jihad for Love"
"I think my entire life has been leading up to this film," said Parvez Sharma, director of the documentary, "A Jihad For Love," which is produced by Sandi DuBowski (director of "Trembling Before G-d," which told the stories of Jewish Orthodox gays), and playing to sold out screenings and standing ovations here in Toronto. "Jihad" details the five-year project Sharma undertook exploring the lives of Muslim homosexuals in Europe, South Asia, the Middle East, South Africa and beyond.
"It's been a remarkable personal journey. It's been my own search for Islam and I have discovered so many things about my religion. I did not know the profound struggle it takes to be able to exercise sexual choice when you are surrounded by religious dogma that basically condemns you to hell."
On getting access to explore the lives of gay Muslims, Sharma said, "As a Muslim director, I had to go back into my own communities. I was searching for my own Islam. I had to develop relationships of trust and understanding with each one of the characters to even get them to the point of wanting to share the personal aspects of their lives. I had to do this with a tremendous amount of responsibility as a Muslim at a time where Islam is under so much attack to make a film that would be deeply respectful of Islam."
As one might suspect, the project was not an easy one for Sharma. "[Making] this film was very challenging and very interesting because the same Islam - the way I look - that makes me so recognizable in the West gave me a degree of protection when I went back in my own communities," he said. "So I had that invisibility but I was also dealing with governments who would have never given me permission - officially - to allow me to make this film if I had made a public request." In at least two instances he left tapes behind, ensuring the copies would be destroyed after he left. He would tape the beginning and ends of tapes with tourist-esque footage (which he acknowledges was no fun for his editor) and never take them as carry-on. "It served us well," he said. "While you're going to a place of relative safety as a filmmaker, you're leaving behind these gay and lesbian Muslims in their own communities. How do you protect them and what does that mean?"
DuBowski and Sharma met in January 2002 at a panel for "Trembling," and Sharma approached him afterwards with his idea. Five and a half years later, DuBowski is here in Toronto after serving as the film's producer. "It's really quite amazing," DuBowski said. "At the screening, there was a man in the audience who got up in the middle [to leave]." Worried he was not enjoying the film, DuBowski noticed as he passed by that he was sobbing, so Dubowksi followed him outside to make sure he was okay.
"He was just hysterically crying", said DuBowski. He had immigrated from Uganda and faced deportation to a country going through a huge anti-gay hysteria. He just kept saying, 'This was my story, this was my story.'" [Peter Knegt]
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