“A Jihad for [Gay] Love”

“A Jihad for Love” is one of the movies set in the Middle East that is already drawing the attention at this year’s Toronto International Film Festival. The movie is in fact a documentary about Islam and homosexuality – two words that seem to never be capable of getting along one with another.
But the creators of “A Jihad for Love” have been brave enough to touch through their cinematographic project this taboo subject and the movie has already created a buzz at the international film festival from Canada.
The documentary has been created during six years of work and it has followed gay and lesbian Muslim people that have been battling racial profiling and harassment after the terrorist attacks from the 11th of September in the United States, and then the ones from London and Madrid.
So, amazingly enough the movie appears to be telling rather the story about how the (gay) Muslims have been harassed as a result of the terrorist attacks and of the wrong impression about Muslims that the whole world has started to have after these attacks, than an expected story about how the Islamic religion and culture fights against homosexuality and harasses the gay people. So the movie’s subject is quite strange, but none of the less interesting.
“A Jihad for Love” has been directed by the Indian filmmaker Parvez Sharma; he has followed the gay Muslims in no less than 12 countries (such as India, Iran, Pakistan, Turkey, Egypt, France, South Africa and others). Nine languages are also spoken during the documentary, for which the Indian filmmaker has been always filming in secret, for escaping the local authorities’ attention.
However, Parvez Sharma’s documentary will face stiff competition in the Toronto International Film Festival, as there at least three important other movies that focus on the events from the Middle East: Paul Haggis’ “In the Valley of Elah”, Nick Broomfield’s “Battle for Haditha” and Brian DePalma’s “Redacted”. But, the only thing that could bring Parvez Sharma the victory is the oddity of his documentary’s subject, which is anyway more interesting than the common movies about the Middle East wars and their already known common results and effects.
“Hollywood and the mainstream film industry are jumping on the Muslim bandwagon and making films around Islam because of the U.S. involvement in Iraq. But I feel that a lot of films that are made about Muslims are mediated through Western eyes.” – has said Parvez Sharma, whose documentary aims at shifting the discourse about Islam by “empowering a community that has been silenced, allowing them to tell the story about Islam.”

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