The Oath (Laura Poitras, 2010) 8/10
It focuses on one man for the most part, an intriguing man, important in post 9/11. He's Abu Jandal, that's one of his many names, aliases. He was ~37 when the documentary was released, is 44 now. He'd been close in a sense to Usama Bin Laden in Afghanistan, had met most if not all of the 9/11 hijackers, but evidently didn't know at the time what they were preparing to do. At least, that's what he claimed and his interrogators didn't seemed to doubt that, but who knows? He was in prison when 9/11 occurred and soon after (a week?) the FBI started interrogating him over 15 days. There was a ton of actionable intelligence they got from him and US action post 9/11 was actually delayed until they could process a lot of that info, so it said in The Oath.
The Oath itself is a promise to shun your personal agenda and be subservient to the wishes of the "leaders" of the jihad. They may have actually been made to sign that. Abu Jandal was a jihadist, at least initially, but comes off as having changed his mind about things over time, that's what he maintains. He's rather articulate, full of energy, not all positive. He speaks in Arabic entirely here, so the English subtitles were ubiquitous. I even turned on subs sometimes to catch the rare English. No other streams there. This is complex, a lot going on. It took me way over the running time to finish because I very very very often hit pause so I could savor the subtitles. It was all about understanding the dialogue. There are extras, I didn't access them last night.
My one insight here, nothing new, but I had the idea, trying to suss out something, some meaning, was that it's the black gold, the oil that's poisoned the middle east. All that money and it's gone into the hands of very few. Very powerful forces are at work politically that are not about democracy at all but about locking up the valuable resources and that's mainly, maybe practically all about OIL!
Of course, Bin Laden hated America.
You get a lot of info on the day to day influence, the importance of Islam in the lives of these people, the Arabs, the Sunnis. How it pervades the language, their communications with themselves and each other. It's just pervasive. I think it's nutty, really. They need a serious dose of secularism. This subservience of the self to a deity is what Islam appears to be, at least as portrayed here. The almighty is other than self. It's madness, actually. Abu saddles his one child (a boy of maybe 6) with this, just drills it into him, it makes you squirm. The women, at least in public, if full grown, all you see of them is a slit for the eyes. Other than that they are in jet black. It's disconcerting. You see a lot of traffic, the cars, the motorized bikes, the bicycles, the pedestrians jaywalking everywhere. Abu is a taxi driver during most of this. The closing credits are amazing, just a hand held camera walking through a commercial district. Beautiful lighting!
I had another insight... there's a big difference between being a fly on the wall and a documentary film maker! It's just the nature of things.