Also Known as Jihadi

Also Known As Jihadi follows the progress of a young man’s journey from France to Syria and back to France, where he is incarcerated for allegedly joining Daesh. Based on real events and drawn from thousands of pages of judicial documents, this cinematic work employs landscape theory (fukeiron in Japanese). This theory originated in the film AKA Serial Killer (1969) co-directed by Masao Adachi, who was the subject of an earlier film work by Baudelaire, The Anabasis of May and Fusako Shigenobu, Masao Adachi, and 27 Years without Images (2011). In Also Known As Jihadi, the character’s paths to radicalism are rendered purely through a series of landscape shots at locations traversed by the subject: a biography determined not by what the subject did, but by what the subject saw, and one that questions how these landscapes reflect the social and political structures that backdrop this journey of alienation and return.

2017, DCP, French, English subtitles, 102 min

With Courtisane, the Research Group General Literary Sciences and Cultural Studies, Lieven Gevaert Centre & the Higher Institute for Philosophy (KU Leuven).

Thanks to the Goethe-Institut Brussels.