Radical - Exiting Extremism: Film series seeks answers to the question, 'Why are terrible political ideas so contagious?'
By Liam Lacey
There’s an unsettling moment in the documentary Wild Heart - part of the series Radical – Exiting Extremism, showing via the digital TIFF Bell Lightbox this month - when the anti-fascist punk rocker Jan “Monchi” Gorkow, describes finding himself, a 14-year-old soccer hooligan, thrown into a Dortmund jail.
One wall of the prison, he recalls, was covered in Islamic slogans from Middle-Eastern inmates. On the other were Nazi messages and swastikas.
Why are terrible political ideas so contagious? That’s the topical question explored in the short film series, consisting of two German-language documentaries and one feature. Presented by the Goethe-Institut, along with the Toronto Jewish Film Society, TJIFF and Neuberger Holocaust Education Centre, the series is available across Canada through March, with films introduced by the filmmakers and anti-hate experts.
Anti-Nazi punker Monchi Gorkow, in a scene from Wild Heart, part of the Radical - Exiting Extremism series
The first of these films (March 4-6) is a new documentary, The Renegades — Long Way from Home, from co-directors Mariam Nouri and Lisa Maria Hagen, a somewhat staged but compelling film about Islamic radicalization.
Following the declaration of the Islamic State’s Caliphate in 2014, hundreds of young European men, decided to join ISIS. Two of them, based in same “German unit” in the Syrian city of Raqqa, were a young German Muslim man, Ferhat Keskin and Oliver N, a red-haired 16-year-old Austrian who had converted to Islam in a group home.
One strand of the film follows Ferhat’s older sister, Meral, as she seeks information about her brother’s death and chastises herself for not saving him from his determined martyrdom. The other story follows Oliver N. on his road to recovery and repentance.
Inevitably, they meet, for a brief but insightful conversation, in which he reassures her: Nothing she could have said would have changed her brother’s mind. One bizarre detail: In both cases, friends and family of the young men knew something was seriously wrong when Ferhat rejected their dogs, an animal Muslim orthodoxy considers unclean.
PROUDLY SUPPORTS ORIGINAL-CIN
Renegades is the showcase film here, the other two films are of interest. Wild Heart (March 8-10), a rough punk portrait of Jan Gorkow, the protest-shouting plus-sized frontman for the band, Feine Sahne Fischfilet (Fine Cream Fish Filet).
The former teen hell-raiser’s backstory, and political awakening, is told with the help of friends and his hilariously patient parents.
Gorkow has appeared more than once on the government’s watch list for his purported anti-state lyrics, especially his conviction that police should be less concerned about protecting the rights of Nazis.
The final film of the series, Combat Girls (March 11-14), a social message film is old news, released way back in 2011. Twenty-year-old Marisa (Alina Levshin) is the alpha female in a skinhead gang, who. likes to get drunk and terrorize immigrants with her violent boyfriend and his cronies.
But Marisa has her softer side — she cares for her dying Nazi grandfather and worries about the scooter-riding Afghani teen she ran off the road.
The other “combat girl” is 15-year-old, Svenja (Jella Haase), a bright teen, who reacts to stifling home life by joining the same hard-partying gang. Familiar ideas feel fresh in David Wnendt’s well-paced first feature, which, in retrospect, reveals a significant gap between the Nazi revival at home and abroad:
To wit: The torch-carrying men chanting racist slogans at Charlottesville found their truth on the Internet. For the German kids, the source can be as close as the angry old man in the upstairs room.
Tickets for Radical — Exiting Extremism are available from TIFF Bell Lightbox at https://digital.tiff.net