Meg Smaker fought fires and was held captive. Then came the real test

Before turning to documentary filmmaking, Meg Smaker worked as a firefighter in California and elsewhere. Midway through our conversation, it emerges that she has special training in dealing with fires involving hazardous materials (when you go on a call and the smoke is green, she notes, it’s not a good sign).

From her early 20s Smaker also travelled widely, including in some of the most dangerous regions on the planet. In the wake of the September 11 attacks, in which many of her fellow firefighters were killed, she set out alone for Afghanistan to see what she could learn first-hand about why the attacks happened. A year or two later she visited Panama, where she was kidnapped near the Colombian border by a paramilitary group and held captive for almost a fortnight.

All this experience with high-pressure situations undoubtedly stood her in good stead in making The UnRedacted, her first feature-length documentary – and in the aftermath, when the film proved more inflammatory than she could have anticipated.

The origins of The UnRedacted (originally titled Jihad Rehab) lie in the years Smaker spent living and working in Yemen, a period that crucially reshaped her worldview.

“When 9/11 happened, I had seen my country as the victim,” she says. “Then when I moved to Yemen and I saw what my country was doing in the region, the droning in Yemen and the disappearing of people there, I saw my country as a perpetrator.” (Today, she says she has a foot in both camps.)

It was around that time that she first heard of the Prince Mohammed Bin Nayef Centre for Counselling and Care, a facility in the Saudi Arabian capital of Riyadh which serves as a “halfway house” for suspected jihadists.

As she depicts in The UnRedacted, the men held at the centre, including those handed over by the US, attend lectures on psychology, participate in counselling sessions and art therapy, and are generally prepared for re-entry into society (under strict conditions, including the threat that a “sponsor”, typically a family member, will be imprisoned if things don’t go well).

Made over several years, The UnRedacted is a close-up portrait of a group of mainly Yemeni men undergoing this treatment. Defensive at first, they slowly open up, revealing their insecurities and their hopes for when they “graduate” from the centre.

How did Smaker go about winning the trust of her subjects, who had no immediate reason to be well-disposed towards Americans? By her account, her gender was one major factor.

“If you’re a big white dude and you walk into the room, these men have just been tortured for 15 years by people who look like you,” she tells me. “You walk in and you’re a threat. I’m a six foot tall albino Godzilla that speaks Arabic. I walk in and I’m more of a curiosity than a threat.”

In turn, Smaker developed a close bond with her subjects. The film doesn’t gloss over how they were treated in Guantanamo, nor is it uncritical of the current regime in Saudi Arabia, even if it could never have been made without the Saudi authorities on board.

‘I’m a six foot tall albino Godzilla that speaks Arabic. I’m more of a curiosity than a threat.’

Meg Smaker

Nor is it taken for granted that any of the men profiled ever truly qualified as “terrorists”. We know that none were ever formally charged, let alone convicted – and there’s room to wonder if anything they say on camera can be taken at face value, whether it suggests innocence or guilt.

“The United States government has almost limitless resources, and the United States had these men for a decade and a half,” Smaker says. “And in that time they were unable to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt what these men did and didn’t do.”

Still, she’s not personally in much doubt that they had some involvement with jihadist groups, at least to the degree of attending training sessions. “There’s been a lot of films about people in Guantanamo who were completely innocent – just wrong place, wrong time,” she says. “That’s a story that’s already been told, and I wasn’t really interested in that.”

Having embarked on the film with the goal of combating stereotypes, Smaker was taken aback by the furore sparked by its selection for the 2022 Sundance Film Festival, beginning well before it premiered. A group of Muslim and Arab filmmakers contacted the festival with their concerns, acknowledging they’d yet to see it for themselves but citing the grim human rights record of the Saudi government. Separately, questions were raised within the festival organisation about whether Smaker had done enough to ensure the safety of her interviewees.

None of this ultimately stopped the premiere from going ahead (online, like the rest of the festival that year). But the film was now under a cloud that continued to spread.

Two senior staff at Sundance resigned, planned screenings at other festivals were cancelled, and Abigail Disney, one of the executive producers, publicly expressed her regret at backing a project that painted Muslim people as “terrorists or former terrorists or potential terrorists”.

Since then it’s not all been bad news: The UnRedacted has received sympathetic coverage in mainstream outlets including The New York Times, while a GoFundMe campaign aimed at helping Smaker distribute the film has gone viral.

Still, the flames of controversy haven’t entirely died out – and as Smaker prepares to introduce a series of screenings in Australia, she’s ready to hose down a few misconceptions.

She can see why Muslims especially might have had qualms about the project when they first heard of it. “There was this judgment of, oh, this person made this film and they are not Muslim, not Arab. So this is probably going to be like all the other films made about this subject matter, which is going to be harmful to our community. Which I understand.”

But she’s not convinced that her leading critics (none of whom, she says, are Saudi or Yemeni) are equipped to judge the precautions she took. “They don’t know anything about the socio-economic make-up of Saudi Arabia, and how that shifted, and what it is now,” she says. “To be honest, it’s like someone ... watching a NASA spaceship take off who has zero experience in rocket science saying like, oh, today there’s three clouds in the sky, so this is really unsafe.”

In this context, Smaker doesn’t necessarily consider herself an outsider (it’s not her word, she stresses). At the same time, she resists the very notion that “you should only be able to tell a story of a group that you are a part of”.

Strictly speaking, that would rule out most of the documentaries ever made – and, as she observes, most newspaper stories like this one.

“That means a man can’t tell a story about a woman. That means a woman who’s middle-class can’t tell a story about a woman who’s working-class. This divisiveness is basically the flattening of humans. And what I mean by that is you are more than the boxes you would check on some census.

“You’re ignoring all the things that make us beautiful and unique, and all of the experiences that we have that actually form the way we view the world.”

The UnRedacted screens at the Kino in Melbourne, April 30, 4:30pm; Theatre Royal in Castlemaine, May 3, 7.30pm; and the Chauvel Cinema in Sydney, May 5, 6.30pm. Smaker will be present for Q&A sessions at all three screenings.

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