What does it tell us about the times we live in that when a Muslim father hears that his son is missing in a terror attack his first reaction, incredibly, is to hope-no, not that he is safe but that he wasn't involved in the atrocity?
This, of course, is not what we routinely see on our TV screens after a terrorist incident. Instead, the standard line we hear so often is: “I know my son. He couldn't have done such a thing .”
Yet, behind these emotional denials there are often deeply-held private fears: what if my son was really involved? After all, how many parents (Muslim or non-Muslim) these days actually know what their children are up to, particularly if they live away from their family? Remember Kafeel Ahmed, a research student from Bangalore, who unknown to his parents was busy trying to blow up the Glasgow airport? And, similarly, families of many of the suicide bombers involved in the London bombings of July, 7, 2005 had no idea about their plans.
But Muslim parents' fears are more than matched by non-Muslim paranoia about their own children getting “mixed up” with “Pakis” and “crazy Arabs.” And it is this everyday reality of millions of Muslims and non-Muslims that forms the broad theme of the acclaimed Franco-Algerian director Rachid Bouchareb's award-winning film London River set against the backdrop of the London bombings. He is best known for Days of Glory which was nominated for the Academy award for the Best Foreign language film in 2006.
It is the first film to be made on the 7/7 attacks and it has been widely commented how British film-makers have tended to “shy away” from approaching the subject leaving it to a foreigner to make a film on Britain's worst terror attack. But, in a way, it is just as well because Bouchareb is able to give it an outsider's perspective without getting overwhelmed by emotions.
Accolades at festival
Critics gave the film a big thumbs-up at the Berlin Film Festival last year, where it won two awards, praising it for Bouchareb's understated treatment of a difficult and controversial subject and the performances of its two main protagonists, the British actor Brenda Blethyn still remembered for her role in Mike Leigh's Secrets and Lies ; and Sotigui Kouyaté, the highly-regarded Malian actor who collaborated with Peter Brook on The Mahabharata . He died two months ago.
Although the film's commercial British release last week on the fifth anniversary of the London attacks failed to evoke much public enthusiasm perhaps because of poor publicity, it is seen as a welcome contribution to the debate on Britain's post-7/7 cultural tensions. The fact, though, is (and the film underlines this) that that these tensions predate the 7/7 atrocity which, for many Britons, simply confirmed their worst anti-Muslim/anti-Islam prejudices and deepened the divisions that until then were hidden behind the fig-leaf of multiculturalism.
London River is as much an extremely moving human story of loss and pain, not to mention senseless violence, as it is a quiet heartfelt appeal for cultural understanding that in the hands of a lesser or overtly ideological director could have easily descended into didacticism. It follows the separate journeys of a white Christian British mother and a French-speaking African Muslim to London in search of their children (the mother looking for her young daughter and the father for his young son) who go missing after the London attacks.
As their paths cross, the stage is set for a minor clash of civilisations between a culturally insular Middle England woman and a devout African Muslim with a long beard and knee-length dreadlocks who speaks only Arabic and French. Arriving from the quiet backwaters of Guernsey into a chaotic multicultural London, she is shocked to discover that her daughter, Jane, lived in a predominantly Muslim neighbourhood amid halal butchers' shops and Arab grocery stores. (See how little parents know about their children.)
“This place is crawling with Muslims,” she screams in horror to her brother on the phone. A line that many Britons often find themselves saying while warily picking their way through Edgware Road or Brick Lane packed with Urdu/Arabic speaking Muslims. She is horrified that Jane was learning Arabic.
“But why would she do that? Who speaks Arabic ?” she asks in genuine bewilderment.
But her world really comes crashing down when she learns that Jane had been living with this strange-looking African Muslim's son. She recoils in horror at the very idea of a “sensible” English girl having anything to do with a Muslim boy. Eventually, however, it is a shared sense of loss as they scour London's hospitals and mortuaries for their missing children that slowly brings them closer. It is during these hesitant meetings and conversations that the old man voices his worst fears about his son.
“You thought he might have been killed in the bombings?” the woman asks him.
“No, that he might have done it...” he answers in perhaps the film's most candid and depressing moment.
Can it get any more frightening for a parent?
