DEEYAH CHANGE MAKERS #1
Deeyah Khan is an award-winning documentary filmmaker of South Asian origin who was raised in Norway. Her work addresses issues surrounding religion, extremism, cultural and societal expectations, questioning stereotypes, with the intention to educate, empower and inspire change. In addition to her efforts behind the camera, she is the founder of the two-time Emmy-winning and the twice BAFTA-nominated media production company Fuuse, which focuses on giving a voice to minorities, and established the magazine ‘sister-hood’, publishing writings from women of Muslim heritage, whether they actively practice the religion or not.
DE: What motivates you to do what you do? I’m passionate about human rights, women’s liberation, inclusion, free expression, and I’m passionate about telling stories, especially stories that wouldn’t get told otherwise. I always want to better understand big problems in our societies and my filmmaking is my personal way of getting to the heart of the matter. I want to find out what people feel, not just what they say.
boring— I already know what they believe. What I want to understand is why they believe and do the things that they do. I am far more interested in getting them in touch with their emotions rather than having a superficial conversation. It’s always surprising how revealing that can be.
Going under the surface was how I created ‘Jihad’ and ‘White Right’. In both cases I have been talking to men involved in violence, which they justified with reference to these exclusionary ideologies. Some of these men were really scary, but it wasn’t necessarily the ideology that was driving them. They all had holes in their lives that they were filling up with this ideology, social problems that they were compensating for through being involved in these groups.
The other big theme in my work is around women and people who exist between cultures. Growing up myself as a South Asian woman in Norway, I’m aware of the different pulls of family and community and how it can clash with the mainstream culture of the societies that we grow up in. I’m very aware of how this impacts upon women, due to cultural taboos around sex, sexuality, self-determination, honour, shame culture and religion. The subject of my first film, ‘Banaz: A Love Story’ was about the strain put upon young people to live up to standards of ‘honour’— the values of their parents and their parents’ community.
I feel that we can’t necessarily change people by challenging their opinions directly, because there are often reasons why they hold those opinions that are often based in emotion, not fact. We have to think about what made those opinions important to them in the first place. Why would these men, whether white supremacists or jihadis, choose to identify themselves as part of what they perceive to be a superior group, and as the victims of another, ‘inferior’ group? What emotional need does this fulfil? I think these are far more important questions than asking them to explain why they think Islam means striving to live under a caliphate or why they think white people are superior to others. I get them to put those arguments and their talking points to one side, because I find those arguments to be predictable and
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DESIGN EXCHANGE
These values are in tension with any young person’s desire for freedom and self-expression, particularly when it comes to relationships. Disagreements on the subject of religion can be just as contentious. This is especially true in an environment where extremely reductive and restrictive interpretations of Islam are being violently enforced by some in the community. I explored this in ‘Islam’s Non-Believers’. With each project, I’m motivated to explore a social problem that I think we need to understand more deeply and to talk about more openly, or that we need to think about differently. And I’m always hoping that I can make a positive impact on how we, as a society, deal with the issue.
