"Dear Son"; The Beloved Son Who Joined ISIS

Note: This note recounts the story of the film. The second edition of the El Gouna Film Festival in Egypt, which has become one of the largest film festivals in the Middle East despite being relatively new, is hosting a film titled "Dear Son" directed by Mohamed Ben Attia; a Tunisian filmmaker who shone with his first film in the competition section of the Berlin Festival in 2016. Now, he has taken a controversial subject for his second film: the joining of a nineteen-year-old Tunisian youth to the terrorist group ISIS. The film begins by depicting the daily life of a family; where an ordinary urban father and mother are worried about their nineteen-year-old son who suffers from migraines. They face financial difficulties that affect their daily life, but the expenses for their son and preparing him for an important upcoming exam take priority. However, a few days before the exam, the son disappears, and the father heads towards Syria in search of any sign of him. There are films that narrate the story of a jihadist and his recruitment into terrorist groups, but this time we do not know much about this boy. The film is essentially a narrative about the family's condition - or more accurately, the father of a family - who bitterly loses his son. Our understanding of this boy in his daily life - which is narrated from the father's perspective in the first half hour - is limited to the ordinary life of a reclusive young man about whom we know nothing of his religious interests, and even his mother says he does not pray. The film only briefly mentions his suspicious behavior in a few very short scenes, and the viewer - if unaware of the film's story - is astonished by his joining ISIS. This astonishment connects the viewer to the father - the main character of the film. Now we see the world through his eyes; a father for whom everything is his son, now confronted with the bitter reality that his son has joined murderous terrorists who hold no value for humanity. The film tells of a father's struggle to bring his son back to life. He sells his car to go to Syria in hopes of finding his son. His efforts are in vain, and the man - who still cannot believe his son has become a terrorist - returns to Tunisia lonelier and more exhausted than before, and to keep his wife satisfied, he tells her he has seen their son, in good and humane circumstances. A key dialogue in the film occurs when an elderly hotelier in a border town in Turkey tells him that his four sons have not contacted him for years, and later, turning to the father who says he gives everything for his child, he says: "The important thing is that we, meaning ourselves, are happy now." This is a line that perhaps an astute viewer will recall in the final scene; where the man sits with his young colleagues - and finally - laughs. The film is, in fact, more about the condition of an elderly man with a simple world who becomes entangled in a complex problem that drives his daily life to the brink of destruction. Gradually, he loses everything: first, his son, whom he calls the "meaning of his life," then his car, all his possessions (on the journey), his family honor and respect in the community, and finally, in an unexpected scene at the end, his wife. His wife's departure may mark the end of the transformation of a man who, after learning of his son's impending fatherhood in Syria, ultimately deleted his message and could not remind his son that he should be ashamed of bringing a child "among the butchers of humanity." Despite the slow pacing of the narrative - especially in the first half hour before the son's disappearance, which could have been shorter and significantly harmed the film - it succeeds in choosing a different perspective in narrating a not-so-new story and ultimately tries to search for the meaning of life with all its problems in the present; at the moment when breathing occurs and passes and never returns.