Cowardice at Sundance (Why Was Jihad Rehab Canceled?)

The Atlantic ^ | OCTOBER 27 | Graeme Wood

[nickcarraway]

Why was Jihad Rehab canceled? And who is behind the most serious charges leveled against the documentary?

ust about every movie you have ever wanted to see is available to stream. Download some app, and $3.99 later, the opening credits will roll. But the films that command the attention of the real cinephiles are those unavailable to stream at any price. For years, the king of this category was The Day the Clown Cried (1972), a comedy about the Holocaust by the Nutty Professor star Jerry Lewis, who was ashamed of the film and prevented its release. You have not seen it. You cannot see it. These are “lost” films, and in many cases the reasons for their loss—politics, orphaned IP, good taste—are as interesting as the films themselves.

The latest entry into this forbidden category is Jihad Rehab (2022), a documentary about former Guantánamo prisoners in Saudi Arabia. You have not seen it. You cannot see it, unless its director, a Californian named Meg Smaker, has sent you a copy, or you attended one of the few film festivals that agreed to show it and did not subsequently back out. In December, the film was considered one of 2022’s most compelling documentaries, and the chances were high that some streaming provider would be pushing it into your living room with great insistence right now. But in January, the Sundance Film Festival screened it, and some employees of the Sundance Institute, which operates alongside the festival, soon resigned in protest. Even before viewing it, they had criticized the film for a multitude of sins, including the exploitation of its subjects and cultural insensitivity. The film’s best-known financier, Abigail Disney, repudiated the film, and others who had seen it and admired it spoke up to denounce Smaker. Distributors and other festivals shunned

[Boogieman]

Another film in this category is “Glitterati” by Roger Avary. It is loosely based on the Bret Easton Ellis novel “Glamorama” and was filmed guerilla style during the filming of the released film “Rules of Attraction” (based on a different Bret Easton Ellis novel).

It’s considered to be unreleasable because of the way it was filmed. Avary followed his lead actor (who stayed in character all the time) around Europe and shot everything that happened to him, drug use and sexual encounters included, then edited the footage to fit the narrative. Most of the “characters” in the film are actually real people who didn’t know they were being filmed as part of a motion picture and didn’t sign releases.

So the only way you will ever see this film is if you attend some event that Avary is at and he screens it himself for the private audience.

[buwaya]

That documentary film industry, such as it is, seems to be a very small and incestuous subculture. As the article notes, just a few people control the chokepoints that determine success and failure, and these people are driven not by pursuit of profit but by status within their own little society.

And because these things live on subsidies and charity, in effect, the actual audience is irrelevant as a revenue source, and audience reaction is also irrelevant. The audiences are too small to make it all pay.

The filmmaker is best advised to ignore the formal institutions and venues, and chase her own audience, on Youtube and the like. That is a vastly bigger industry these days than the film festival circuit.