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Rating: Country: USA/UK/France/Germany/Australia Release Date: April 28, 2009 Distributor: First Run Features Director: · Parvez Sharma Related Sites: · IMDb: A Jihad For Love Grade: D-

The thing about “A Jihad For Love”, is not only that its title could be interpreted as somewhat offensive, if not construed in a more classicist fashion rather than the more modern “holy war” interpretations, but also that it’s pretty milquetoast, perfunctory and middling to really succeed in any of its aims. We know that director Parvez Sharma is, himself, a gay Muslim, the very subject of the documentary, which is perhaps why the film is met with incident and melodrama rather than incisive fact and exploration. It is handled internally and with emotion, rather than objective observation. There simply isn’t enough context for the documentary to work as anything other than a passing mode of empathy for people we don’t know, and are not given the opportunity to identify with. There is clear rage, but little intelligence.

Through many interviews of subjects from Egypt to Iran, the documentary features a group of homosexual Iranian men seeking refugee status in Canada, a divorced Muslim with two children that now identifies as homosexual, a Sapphic Parisian couple and many others. The gist of the film is horror stories, violence, and death threats in the face of an antiquated, backwards religion, and those unwilling to waver from a particular, constructed, belief system, given a lack of perspective outside of temporarily sated annihilation anxieties.

Some stories are heartbreaking, others are more repetitive and confounding, but mostly it’s interviews with uneducated—and resultantly fanatically religious—Muslims that talk of killing homosexuals and throwing them from cliffs, without emotion or thought, which incites the necessary rage to keep the documentary progressing on an emotional level.

While investigation is perhaps asking too much, some deeper examinations into religious foundations and the psychology behind accepting a religion partially founded on hate, may have given the documentary some much-needed oomph.

As it stands, the documentary is a listing of events and ideas, as opposed to an exploration of them, and to boot, it features some lengthy animal slaughter sequences which made this reviewer consider just throwing the documentary in the garbage and not taking the time to write anything about it. Perhaps the artistic intent was to imply that Iran is an animalistic toilet, but it resulted in little more than glowering disdain from this end.

The DVD includes a director interview, some new footage from Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, along with a Behind the Scenes, which were not included in the disc provided to press.