{"id":22250,"date":"2018-11-18T04:22:11","date_gmt":"2018-11-18T04:22:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=22250"},"modified":"2018-11-18T04:22:11","modified_gmt":"2018-11-18T04:22:11","slug":"of-fathers-and-sons-a-bleak-look-at-transformation-of-children-into-militants","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/?p=22250","title":{"rendered":"\u2018Of Fathers and Sons,\u2019 a bleak look at transformation of children into militants"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u2018Of Fathers and Sons,\u2019 a bleak look at transformation of children into militants<\/h2>\n
\n

\nLOS ANGELES: A group of children giggle as they play in a dusty, barren landscape near their home in northern Syria, but this is no ordinary game of catch, for their ball is a live bomb.
The macabre game of chicken is one of the most blood-chilling scenes in \u201cOf Fathers and Sons,\u201d filmmaker Talal Derki\u2019s disturbing new expose on the grip of extremism in his native Syria.
\u201cThis is the scene that broke my heart,\u201d Derki told AFP in an interview in Los Angeles this week, recalling the blood-chilling episode.
\u201cI was seeing my six-year-old boy through the lens.\u201d
For more than two years, the celebrated filmmaker lived with a family in a war-ravaged region bordering Turkey, focusing his camera primarily on the children to capture their gradual radicalization.
The result is a bleak and haunting 98-minute documentary that gives viewers rare insight into the brutal daily life of militants, who in recent years have sown fear across the globe.
\u201cI call it the nightmare,\u201d the 41-year-old filmmaker said, referring to the spread of the jihadist movement.
The film, released in the US on Thursday, won the world cinema documentary competition at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year.
Derki\u2019s previous documentary, \u201cReturn to Homs,\u201d won the grand jury prize at Sundance in the same category in 2014.
\u201cOf Father and Sons\u201d tracks Abu Osama, one of the founders of Al-Nusra, an Al-Qaeda affiliate group, as he leads two of his eight sons \u2014 Osama, 13, named after dad\u2019s personal hero Osama bin Laden, and Ayman, 12, named after the current Al-Qaeda leader Ayman Al-Zawahiri \u2014 down the path to jihad.
Berlin-based Derki said he gained Abu Osama\u2019s trust by posing as a war photographer sympathetic to the militant cause and lived on-and-off with the family for two-and-a-half years, sharing their most intimate moments.\"\"
The horror in the film does not come from violence and blood and gore, Derki said. Rather the viewer is sickened as the documentary charts the children\u2019s brutal transformation from innocent youths to fighters.
\u201cThis is a film that makes you understand how the brain functions,\u201d Derki said. \u201cYou have the horror in the language, in the education, in a single moment.\u201d
He said he is still haunted by several scenes in his film, notably the one with the children playing with the makeshift bomb.
In another scene, one of the children proudly boasts to Abu Osama \u2014 which means father of Osama in Arabic \u2014 about killing a little bird.
\u201cWe put his head down and cut it off, like how you did it, father, to that man,\u201d the boy proclaims.
The bombed-out desert landscape that the family calls home and the fact that the family\u2019s women are never shown or even heard adds to the sense of despair throughout the film.
\u201cThe women are the biggest victims in this society,\u201d Derki said. \u201cI was there for two and a half years and I didn\u2019t even know what the mother of these children looked like.
\u201cHer name was not uttered and her voice was never heard.\u201d
Derki said that while his first documentary, \u201cReturn to Homs,\u201d tracked the evolution of the Syrian uprising and the regime\u2019s brutal crackdown, \u201cOf Fathers and Sons\u201d was an obvious next chapter in his quest to explain the country\u2019s slide into chaos.
\u201cWe have to use our weapon \u2014 which is cinema \u2014 to show what is really going on there, who these people are, how they brainwash societies,\u201d he said.
\u201cWe have to think before we bomb any area, before we let a dictator kill his own people with heavy weapons,\u201d he added.
Derki said \u201cOf Fathers and Sons\u201d has had such a profound psychological impact on him that he has put down the camera for now as he concentrates on healing.
\u201cI am still recovering,\u201d he said. \u201cI have to take medication to fall asleep, otherwise I have nightmares.\u201d
He added that after the final shoot he had his right arm tattooed and his ear pierced to ensure he would not be tempted to try and embed with militants in the future.
\u201cIf you have tattoos or piercings, you cannot be with them,\u201d he said. \u201cSo this was my way of making sure I don\u2019t go back.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u2018Of Fathers and Sons,\u2019 a bleak look at transformation of children into militants LOS ANGELES: A group of children giggle as they play in a dusty, barren landscape near their home in northern Syria, but this is no ordinary game of catch, for their ball is a live bomb.The macabre game of chicken is one…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":22251,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-22250","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-middle_east_news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22250","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=22250"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22250\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/22251"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=22250"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=22250"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qatar-news.org\/qatarnewsEn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=22250"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}