Chasing Liberty

Freedoms are hotly pursued at the Human Rights Watch film fest

By Darren D’Addario

 

“We lived what people call the American Dream—we had a beautiful home…God had granted us any blessing you could imagine—but [after] September 11, that changed,” says Arab-American Syed Ali, one of the harried subjects in the quietly charged documentary Persons of Interest. The chronicle by Alison Maclean and Tobias Perse is the most potent documentary in this year’s eclectc mix of narratives and nonfiction at the “Human Rights Watch International Film Festival” at Walter Reade Theater. The movie features interviews conducted at the end of Ramadan in 2002 with some of the 5,000 Muslims living in America who were detained, interrogated and imprisoned by the U.S. Justice Department after the World Trade Center tragedy.

 

Ali, who earned a Ph.D. in the U.S. and was a partner in a successful securities film, had his life capsized when a bitter co-worker told the FBI that he was a terrorist. The authorities raided his Roackland County, New York home, found his son’s video game and a ticket stub from a recent visit to the WTC, and arrested him. He spent 105 days in prison without being charged for any crime. Another detainee, Brooklyn deli clerk Faiq Medraj, was arrested and held for 60 days because there were WTC postcards taped to the deli’s freezer.

 

What separates Persons of Interest from your average well-intentioned activist doc isn’t only the passion of the testimony and the Kafkaesque nature of the injustices described, but also the directors’ aesthetic choices. The spartan set is bereft of furniture except for a bench. It has the feel of a holding cell or an interrogation room. The interview style is fumbling and slightly confrontational. Director Maclean, best known for the drama Jesus’ Son, says that these creative decisions were inspired by Director Mohsen Makhmalbaf’s 1995 Salaam Cinema, a documentary that shows actors auditioning for parts in a movie.

 

“We made a point to meet [our subjects] for the very first time when they came in to do the film,” Maclean says. “We didn’t even have a pre-interview with them. We were interested in capturing the encounter in an honest way—with a certain kind of awkwardness.”

 

Perse, who acknowledges that conducting the tense interviews sometimes made him feel uncomfortable, notes that there was another reason for the pressure-packed atmosphere: “We had to do the film quickly because we guessed that some of the interviewees might be deported soon.” A number of them have, in fact, been banished from the country on technicalities. None of the 5,000 has thus far been linked to terrorism.