In February of this year, Howard Stern, ‘shock jock’ notorious for the explicit content of his radio shows, called for submissions for a film festival, to be held in his native New York. I found myself spluttering with disbelief, and something verging on admiration for the self- proclaimed ‘king of all media’. Most audacious was the specification that the storyline for each film entry must centre on Howard Stern himself…

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Moolaadé scooped the Un Certain Regard award at the 2004 Cannes Festival and is due to be released in the UK in June 2005. The film’s director, Senegalese Ousmane Sembene, is widely recognised as the ‘father’ of African cinema. His view: that ‘when women progress, society progresses’. At a time when female genital mutilation is practised in 38 of the 54 countries of the African Union, this is a hugely important film.

Set in a West African village, Moolaadé immerses the viewer in the greens and reds and ochres of Africa. There is dance, there is song, there is storytelling and most importantly, there is the way things are done. Women answer to their husbands and the young to their elders. Within the family hierarchy, the first wife has authority over those wives junior to her, and the eldest brother over his younger siblings. The (male) village elders are outraged by Colle’s defiance of their customs. They decree that her husband should command her to break the Moolaadé on his return.

The film is peppered with delicious characters. There is the loquacious town spokesman and the wily mercenaire – irredeemable flirt and slippery salesman. Particularly enjoyable is the relationship between Colle and her husband’s first wife. They have a mutual respect for one another: Colle, for her elder, and the older woman, for the feisty younger wife daring to fight battles she could not. This is a society in which women are not openly defiant. Their victories are subtle, won by stealth or through the embarrassment of their menfolk. Colle’s stance upsets the status quo.

Amongst the women in the village, sex with their menfolk is endured. After all, one of the results of female genital mutilation is to impede a woman’s enjoyment of sex – truly a subjugating act. During sexual intercourse, Colle relives the experience of her own circumcision as a child. It is particularly poignant when her daughter, Amsatu, later rebukes Colle for preventing her from being cut as a girl. Amsatu fears that as a Bilakoro, she will be unable to marry the son of the chief elder, as had been intended.

With the exception of her co-wives, Colle’s protection of the young girls and her stance against genital mutilation are unsupported by the village women. What is it about women that they champion adherence to traditions detrimental to themselves? Is it because they themselves have endured it? Perhaps there is a need to believe in the acceptability of a ritual in order to be able to justify it to oneself. Otherwise, what was once a traditional ceremony becomes an assault, and feelings of righteousness become feelings of violation.

There is fear in the fury of the elders. Fired up by Colle’s stand on circumcision, it is declared that all radios should be cast out, to limit the influence of the outside world on the village womenfolk. In maintaining ignorance, there can be domination. Ruing the loss of the radios that help them sleep at night, the women lament that ‘our men want to lock up our minds.’ A pile of radios grows in the village square, outside the mosque built by the village ancestors and the anthill symbolic of a Moolaadé of old. The film reaches its climax when Colle is beaten by her husband to force her to remove the Moolaadé she has imposed. Everyone in the village takes sides, but the only person prepared to intervene is the mercenaire – to his great cost.

Such is the charm of Moolaadé that the viewer is sucked into the film unwittingly before being reminded that it is about a debasing, debilitating, dangerous custom and indeed about life and death. It is a film about men and women, ignorance and knowledge, tradition and modernity, power and submission. ‘The film will stir debate in Africa’, Ousmane said. ‘I make militant films and this one will serve as a basis to bring men and women together to talk.’ Ultimately, it is about society’s reluctance to change in the face of the truth. But films like this one give us hope.

Yasmin is the product of extensive research through workshops with members of the local Pakistani communities of Oldham, Bradford and Keighley. Simon Beaufoy, writer of The Full Monty, was brought on board as scriptwriter. He recalls one man who attended the workshops saying to the team, ‘I bet I know pretty much everything about your life and you know nothing about my life’. The researchers soon realised he was right.

Yasmin presents real issues, based on stories told by real people, in the context of actual events. To dismiss them as anecdotes is to ignore the bigger picture. The result is a warts-and-all picture of a section of society that most people know little about, set against the backdrop of the 9/11 tragedy.

The film follows the story of a young woman who has rebelled against her culture to the extent that she could be deemed racist. Imagine then, her frustration at being forced into marriage with an illiterate goat herder from Pakistan in order to gain him citizenship. The events of 9/11 force Yasmin and her family to re-evaluate their lives and their identities, both as individuals and as members of their society. She becomes increasingly ostracised by her colleagues at work, and when her husband is later arrested as a potential terrorist suspect, she finds herself unexpectedly returning to her roots.

I ask Kenny whether he thinks Yasmin’s response to feeling discriminated against is representative of the way other individuals dealt with a hostile public post-9/11. ‘We observed a trend – lots of young people going back to religion after 9/11 as a way of re-identifying, re-solidifying who they were. But on their own terms. There’s a lot of guilt in these communities and this film is partly about “Who is your responsibility to?” – is it to your family, your religion, your community or to yourself. This film is about Yasmin’s journey and the stance that she ultimately finds herself taking.’

Is this process a constructive thing to have come out of the 9/11 tragedy? Kenny is undecided. ‘You have to be hopeful that this generation of young people will define itself through positive change. I worry that the authorities’ knee-jerk reaction to try to contain terrorism is affecting many innocent people and distancing an already marginalised community. As long as the same mistakes are being made, I am concerned that we are going to see more radicalised young men, before we see any improvement in the situation.’

Kenny wanted to make a ‘positive film about British Asian Muslims’, in response to the current climate of Islamophobia. Yet Yasmin would not have been representative had some of these more complex issues not also been brought to the forefront. One of the most important questions concerns whether people of different origins have the capacity to truly mix together, rather than just tolerate one another. ‘If integrating means letting go of one’s deep-rooted beliefs and culture in favour of an immoral consumer culture then I can understand why people don’t,’ says Steve Jackson, who plays Yasmin’s white work colleague and potential love interest in the film.

We still live in a society where the children of immigrant parents are required to take sides in every aspect of their lifestyle. ‘There’s always a conflict of interests within my house,’ says Shahid Ahmed, who plays Yasmin’s husband in the film, ‘It’s like you’re leading two lives.’ Their parents want them to remain true to their roots. Yet fitting in to the world around them requires them to renounce many of their parents’ ideals. Many of those who could be described as ‘well-integrated’ have in fact, much like Yasmin, distanced themselves entirely from their parents’ culture.

Progressing as a multicultural society involves breaking down invisible barriers that segregate one community from another. But this will take effort from both sides. The terminology is important. ‘I can remember talking to a sixteen-year old in Oldham about integration,’ says Kenny. ‘He said to me, “I’m not interested in integrating into western culture, it’s a term that implies that I have to lose something of what I am. I prefer the word assimilation – let’s celebrate each other’s culture.’” Ethnic minority communities should not be required to forsake their cultural heritage in order ‘to fit in’. But equally speaking, there needs to be recognition by minority communities that life in a new place means that change is inevitable – and that this is not a negative thing. Every individual brings with them their own anecdotal emotional baggage. What Kenny and his team have done is to concentrate some of these strands into the context of a family with whom most of us can identify.

‘If integrating means letting go of one’s deep-rooted beliefs and culture in favour of an immoral consumer culture then I can understand why people don’t.’

Steve Jackson

Hamburg Cell, which is based on real events, is a disturbing, visually arresting film, but one which refuses to provide neat reasons for complex ideological shifts. Directed by Antonia Bird and scripted by Ronan Bennett and Alice Perman, it traces the lives of the most prominent of the 9/11 hijackers over the five years leading up to one of the most sinister attacks of all time. At the centre of the group is Mohammed Atta, whose fanaticism is clear from the outset. He is an angry, alienated young man, who wants to make sense of the ‘confusion’ that is the modern world – a world that wants ‘to take God from him’.

The film’s main focus is on the story of Ziad Jarrah, the pilot of the plane that may have been heading for the White House, but instead crashed into a Pennsylvanian field. A Lebanese national from an affluent, secular family, Ziad arrives in Germany a moderate university student. Within weeks, he embarks on two significant relationships – one with his Turkish girlfriend, Aysel, and the other with a radical Islamic group based on campus. What follows is not so much a theorisation of the reasons for his decline, but a presentation of the facts as they are known. Yet the objective approach that sets out to provide viewers with their own interpretative space has the unfortunate result of undermining the realism of the piece.

Ziad’s portrayal is frustrating; it fails to explain his seemingly abrupt conversion into a fanatic, whilst maintaining every semblance of a ‘normal’ life. When I challenge researcher and co-writer Alice about this, she is adamant that this is Ziad as he was – known to most as a likeable, westernised Muslim. To some he was more religious, but he concealed his emerging fanaticism from everyone.

This explanation still doesn’t account for the insipid Ziad who mumbles his way through the film. There is no commitment to a clear depiction of his character; his detached ambivalence is the one consistent feature. His relationship with Aysel never seems as genuinely affectionate as the facts suggest it was. Equally, his newfound religious fervour feels hollow. This is a man who left me cold, even more so than his more openly fanatical counterparts.

Research for Hamburg Cell which spanned just less than three years, arose from the observation that no one had tried to deduce what the 9/11 terrorists were actually like as human beings. The filmmakers wanted to stimulate debate, to try to present the terrorists as people rather than to demonise them as monsters – a brave decision in the current climate. Alice acknowledges that there were gaps in the information they were able to collect, particularly with respect to what motivated the men to embrace extremist ideology. This is unsettling for those of us who want to ‘explain away’ fanaticism. The filmmakers could have made an educated guess, instead they made a conscious decision not to fabricate an explanation whenever faced with a question to which they did not know the answer.

This is not a film about moderate Islam. Yet one of the problems I have with Hamburg Cell is that moderate Islam is barely represented. Nothing is done to highlight the difference between religious, non-fanatical Muslims and extremists. Sure, a few secular Muslims are portrayed – Aysel, Jarrah’s uncle, his cousin – but they do not practise at all. It is all too easy to deduce from the film that most mosque-going Muslims can become fanatics. The lack of explanation for the radicalisation of the 9/11 hijackers seems only to emphasise that any, every Muslim could become a terrorist. We are given no insight into the way these men interacted with secular German society and the impact that this may have had on their development. Only a few passing comments are made about political crises at the time (e.g. Chechnya) that may have contributed to their decline.

Some people will consider the depiction of the 9/11 terrorists in the film to be too neutral. My main concern is that in its refusal be subjective, individuals are left to interpret the film in line with their pre-existing prejudices. Extremists from both sides of the argument will feel vindicated. The rest of us will come away knowing little more about the workings of these men’s minds than when we started.

This film would have done itself more justice as a documentary. It could have stimulated just as much thought without failing to deliver on the promise of a story. Audiences seek more than the bones of a story from a film – they require it to be fleshed out as well. The filmmakers present us with shadowy characters and ask us to believe in them first as men and then as radicals, without providing any means of making the connection between the two. In seeking to portray the 9/11 terrorists without giving an opinion, Hamburg Cell only serves to underline how little we know about any of them.