DVD Review - Of Fathers and Sons

Nominated for Best Documentary Feature at the 91st Academy Awards, this film had a small theatrical release, limited to New York and Los Angeles. It was critically acclaimed for how it was made and for its subject matter, which is pretty incredible. The film is about the Syrian Civil War, which began in 2011 and continues to this day. There have been several documentaries at the Oscars that have depicted the conflict. Last Men in Aleppo (2017) was nominated at the 90th Academy Awards. The White Helmets (2016) was nominated at the 89th Academy Awards. Both films were more about the victims of the war, innocent victims or people injured in the ruins of the city. Most of the people involved or profiled are people not against western countries like those in Europe or the Americas. The White Helmets was in fact directed by British filmmakers.

The Syrian Civil War now is very messy and complicated. It started out as a protest against the Syrian government as led by President Bashar al-Assad. The whole thing has devolved into multiple battles against various factions. Some of those factions include terrorist groups such as Al Qaeda and ISIS. These terrorist groups hate western countries. They are Islamic fundamentalists who are not above committing war crimes and human rights abuses, including mass executions, beheading people, rape, torture and the use of child soldiers. One can understand that doing a documentary on them, especially by someone from Europe or the Americas would be impossible. You'd need a spy and essentially that's what the filmmaker here became.

Talal Derki was born in 1977 in Damascus, Syria. He's Kurdish. He graduated from university in 2003. He worked as a freelance cameraman for CNN and Reuters. He now lives in Berlin, Germany. His feature debut The Return to Homs (2014) is about two young Syrians pulled into the war. Obviously, Derki is familiar with the area. He knows people there intimately, so he didn't have to put on too much of a cover to be a spy in his own country. He was then able to embed himself among the Islamic fundamentalists fighting in the war. He's able to question them and listen, as well as film them openly doing what they do, revealing how they live their day-to-day lives and why they do what they do.

The German title of this film is Kinder des Kalifats, which translates into "Children of the Caliphate." Derki's focus does seem to be the children of the fundamentalists. The documentary centers on one father and his two sons. For a lot of these fundamentalists, they're not born but raised and conditioned to hate and to fight or jihad. Derki's film seeks to document that raising and conditioning. He wants to show how these children can grow up to believe in jihad and basically become terrorists.

A lot of what we see is not surprising and not things that haven't been depicted in fictional works of art. The motivations and feelings are even understandable, even if one doesn't know the history of President Assad and the grievances against him or the grievances against the Russians. It's also a bit sobering to see these fundamentalists portrayed as human beings who feel pain and who are capable of love.

Derki includes a lot of tender moments between the father named Abu Osama and his two sons Ayman and Osama. He also disciplines them strongly now and again. Derki though avoids depicting any true horror that these fundamentalists might do. We see Abu Osama shooting at someone, someone whom he does hit. Yet, Derki never turns the camera to show who was shot. He blocks out these horrors. We get a slaughter of a ram, but he avoids depicting the human blood that these people might shed. Derki is perhaps more sympathetic toward them than some might be comfortable with.

The film does conclude with Derki lamenting what is happening in his country, but there is a coda that talks about a divergence between the two sons. One goes off on a path toward becoming a terrorist or at least a rebel fighter. The other goes to school and perhaps down a hopeful path. For those of us in western culture, we can only hope that Abu Osama's hope for a caliphate doesn't come true and that his son who rejected it is more the future.

Not Rated but for contains language and violence.
Running Time: 1 hr. and 39 mins.