Don’t wait until Casey Affleck’s movie about a world without women comes out. You can see Of Fathers and Sons, a dystopian documentary filmed in Syria over the course of two and a half years during the ongoing Syrian Civil War. Talal Derki gets embedded with radical jihadists from the al-Nusra Front, the local name for Al Qaeda, which is allegedly different from Daesh, and lives with Abu Osama, a father of eight who enthusiastically participates in the war and sends two of his sons to a terrorist training camp in hopes that they will follow in his footsteps.
I actually watched Of Fathers and Sons with my mother, and it is rare for both of us to share an interest in watching the same thing. There are subtitles, which is usually enough to deter mom from watching anything, but she hung in there. While the dialogue is important, if you hate subtitles, you can pretty much get a sense of what is going on without reading them though I wouldn’t recommend it. It isn’t an easy movie to watch, but if you do decide to watch it, please give it your complete attention because discerning observation is a required skill to completely absorb the content of this film.
I’ve watched documentaries about North Korea and found unsettling similarities with our society, but it was extremely difficult to do the same with Of Fathers and Sons. Other than toxic masculinity and a weird love of guns, I could personally see some common threads with being raised Christian fundamentalist. As a kid, the only things that are good and should be enjoyed has to be related to Christianity, and not just any kind of Christianity, but had to meet certain specifications. Anything else is of the world and bad. Substitute Islam for Christianity, and not just any Islam, which I know nothing about, but Salafi jihadism. Osama hates Sufis, and the only music that he listens to involves jihad. If his kids react the same way that I did and get exposed to Prince, they’ll be lost to him forever. Any kind of fundamentalism is bad. I bet if there were such a thing as cotton candy fundamentalism, kids would run to balanced diets with open arms. No wonder these kids miss school.
After I watched Of Fathers and Sons and read the professional and ordinary viewer reviews, while many viewers obviously disagreed with Osama because duh, I was surprised how many people empathized with him and expressed how much he loved his sons. Um, he doesn’t even love himself though I believe that he loves himself and his sons in some warped way, but people need to change how they bandy the word love around. Love means wanting what is best for you and others even if it wasn’t what you thought it would originally look like. I was generally horrified that Osama’s idea of paradise on Earth, i.e. his little patch of Al Qaeda, didn’t even seem as if it was ideal for him personally, a fact that should not have eluded him considering his journey during this brief period. There is a verging on the literal canary in the coalmine. The father admonishes his sons not to cage a bird because he was imprisoned once. Awwwwwww. Not so fast, the boys kill him instead, not because they’re hungry because it is a little bird, but they’re probably mimicking the time that their dad beheaded someone. He doesn’t rebuke them for the waste. So cage is cruelty, but killing the bird isn’t. Fuck you, you warped soul. How we treat the little life in our care tells me all I need to know about them.
Of Fathers and Sons is filled with violence if you have eyes to see it. I’m not talking about the war footage, which there really isn’t any since Derki mainly focuses on Osama’s home life. I’m talking about the way that people who are allegedly friends and loved ones treat each other daily. I felt as if I was watching 99 minutes of child abuse, and I’m not exaggerating. A friend of Osama’s visits and casually threatens his boys in not one, not two, not three, but four different ways that he would kill them in front of their father, who is widely admired in the community. I thought that I was soft for feeling sensitive during mild roastings, but I never got jokes about how I would be murdered! I think that these are the jokes, and I’m not supposed to take it seriously. I enjoy some dark humor, horror and Tarantino films, but I can’t find the punchline to threatening to skin a kid look as I may.
While watching Of Fathers and Sons, I played a little game: where are the women and girls? Basically Where’s Waldo, but if you can spot a woman, she is about to be threatened for being seen or worse. It took eighteen minutes before I spotted women or girls. The next time was thirty-five minutes in. Obviously this documentary did not pass the Bechdel test, but it is kind of the point. Osama never interacts with them during the documentary and usually passes messages through his son such as “Tell your mother to be quiet before I tear the whole house down around her.” On one occasion, when one of his wives actually expresses sympathy for him, which how, he says, “Stop crying woman. Get out of my sight.” Unsurprisingly all the boys model their father’s behavior by glaring at a two year old girl for having the temerity to exist. The visceral disgust against their presence astonishes me that they even allow the women to exist and deigned to have children with them. It is a good thing that they don’t like science because if they could have boys without women, they would. Osama has two wives. Yikes.
Visually I was struck that it was easy to think that Of Fathers and Sons was shot a long time ago as if it was a documentary assembled from old footage, but the presence of smartphones and Apple headphones (they didn’t have the wireless pods yet) soon disarmed me of that misperception. All this free Internet and you’re glowing over the prospect of World War III. Well, on the other hand, who doesn’t find a good apocalypse entertaining….theoretically, not literally!
If I had to criticize Of Fathers and Sons, it would be more of a criticism of documentaries generally, not this specific documentary. It is not an expository documentary so I didn’t have a lot of context to understand why Osama was hostile to some of his neighbors. It is a blend of an observational and participatory documentary because of the necessary presence of the director during the shooting, and after he leaves and edits the film, Derki does not add any talking heads and limits his narration to explain how he was able to accomplish it. While I have many impressions, I’m not sure if I learned anything that I didn’t expect going into the film, but it is definitely not a preach to the choir film. He may have deceived his subjects regarding where his sympathies lie, but the footage is organic, and they don’t think that they probably don’t believe that they’re depicted negatively. Shudder.