Recycle City

Massad had just been interviewed by a TV station in Holland, where he lives with his wife and young son, about Zarqa, the brutally misnamed Jordanian town of ash-grey streets and desolate tenements where both he and the now deceased Zarqawi were born and raised. In his gentle, considered manner, he discussed the frustrations and hardships in the town that, when intermingled with devout faith, have created a community squarely at odds with the breathless Westernisation of Amman – the same themes he had been capturing for his latest documentary, Recycle. Later that evening, though, he discovered his insight had been spliced with footage of Nick Berg’s gruesome beheading. The implication was clear, this was an apologist for terror. 

 

“I couldn’t believe it,” says al-Massad, who was confronted the next morning by an irate local, screaming at him to leave “his” country. “I now understand how the news works. Recycle is about the people of this town, my town, and the often unbearable lives they are forced to lead. But because I tried to get know some of these people, that instantly implicates me. People don’t want answers anymore, they want condemnation.

 

“Just think about it, if someone on the street walks up to you and punches you in the face, isn’t your first reaction to ask him why he’d done it? That is what I wanted to see in Zarqa; what are the realities of this place, what is it like to live in such a place, what are the stories that are not being heard?”

 

A press momentarily blurring the distinction between explanation and endorsement wasn’t the only problem Massad faced in during the completion of Recycle. In Zarqa, a population already deeply suspicious of cameras and questions were well policed by a blanket of intelligence officers not exactly renowned for artistic latitude, while those with direct connections to Zarqawi were openly hostile. Fights actually erupted in a mosque when the imam suggested the Koran doesn’t sanction Jihad, and Massad himself received direct threats as he raised his camera to his shoulder once too often. “There were times when I was genuinely scared talking to Zarqawi’s cousins,” he says, now back in Amman and pleased to be picking over fried chicken from his favourite restaurant. “But I had to keep reminding everyone that I am a filmmaker not a news reporter, and that I was not making a film about Zarqawi.”

 

Recycle, though, wouldn’t be quite so extraordinary if its making had been remotely straightforward. The bleak, suffocating portrait of life in Zarqa, seen through the eyes of Abu Turk, an amateur Islamic scholar struggling to raise an army of children on increasingly meagre earnings from his job retrieving cardboard boxes, is brutally honest, frequently uncomfortable and nothing less than compelling. Using rich, penetrating colour, the beguiling set pieces drag the viewer as much into Massad’s world as that of his subject. 

 

Abu Turk is a former Jihadi, a father of seven and husband of two, who has authored a book on holy war in attempt to reconcile the realities of contemporary politics and his faith. With little or no money to achieve his aim of having the work published, despite glowing praise from Koranic academics in Saudi Arabia, he is left to recount the passages to small gatherings of friends in his front room – and worry about where his next meal is coming from. “I met him when I was doing research into another film entirely,” Massad explains, describing how he originally wanted to examine the current cultural conflict between Islam and the west. “I was looking for people in my town who could explain their relationship with Jihad, investigate why extremism seems to breed so easily in my hometown. I spoke to many members of Zarqawi’s family, and people from Hay Massoum who fought in Afghanistan and Iraq with him. But then I met Abu Turk, a neighbour of my father’s, and the focus of the film changed entirely.

 

“Of course, there will be people who only want to show the beautiful side of Jordan, with Petra and Jerash and the Dead Sea,” he says, getting increasingly animated about the direction his country is heading. “I just hope someone here with some vision sees it, understands what I have done, what I was trying to achieve. This country where we have nothing, but we our lavish food and hospitality on our guests. It’s weird, wonderful, beautiful, ugly, desperate. 

“I hope it might make people see that there is genuine need here,” Massad concludes. “I am not worried about criticism. I made a film, not a bomb.”

 

For the full version of this article,see NOX01.