Marcel Mettelsiefen is the director of the Oscar-nominated documentary short film “Watani: My Homeland.” He spent three years in Syria following a widow named Hala as she leaves her homeland to find a better future for her and her children. The director talked to the Hollywood Reporter about his film and the Muslim ban:
“The very special part of it is that this is a female Muslim family. Normally, if you are a man, you are not able to stay with the female women in the same room. But they allowed me to live with them for three years… Hala, very deliberately, wanted to tell a counter-narrative to what is perceived about her religion, in the entire world — this Islamaphobic and xenophobic reaction of, for example, the U.S. government and in Germany. When we watch [this family] we can relate to the decision that a mother takes. Every mother in such a dangerous situation would make the same decisions to take her children and try to leave and seek shelter in another country.”
The filmmaker talks about the impact of Trump’s executive order banning Syrian refugees from entering America. “This is exactly what radical Islamists want. They want the divide…. [The ban] is more proof that the media needs to get the kind of stories out that tell a counter-narrative of the “radical Muslim.” The only thing coming out of Syria right now is the story of radical Islam, and we forget the human story, and this is very dangerous.”
