Very well executed

How sad is this?

Fresh and Exciting

This story has more twists and turns than a second-rate soap opera.

The protagonist in this story is a mess, but he's not the kind of mess worth your time. Born in India and now living in the U.S, he's a homosexual Muslim trying to reconcile this dissonance while documenting his pilgrimage to Mecca.It's not just a documentary about himself though, it's a story about Islam and how it's been interpreted by different cultures.In the process of his trip, we're led down this path thinking that he is going to be the exception to the "Muslim extremists" that we're all told are a minority. He highlights the draconian punishments that are widespread in Islamic countries (i.e. be-headings for being a homosexual), and shows that the religion has been hijacked and advocates reform. (Sadly, the only injustices he really highlights in a religion full of violence and repression are the ones pertaining to homosexuality, which is merely the tip of the iceberg.)He tries so hard to make Islam not look like a universally insane and heartless ideology via his own anecdotal perspective of being an "outsider" Muslim--though it's a difficult argument to buy as he constantly talks to his super power throughout the film. We meet him and his husband and they both seem like pretty typical people with rather average American lives.So he goes to Mecca to be forgiven for his sins and in the process he mostly just highlights how distanced he is from the Islamic order in this part of the world and expresses dismay. He almost makes us think that he might abandon the faith after this unpleasant experience at Mecca.We see all of the insane behaviors that are part of the standard pilgrimage, and he films it in a way that casts doubt on these practices.BUT WE WERE TRICKED!!!It turns out, these religious practices at Mecca weren't extreme enough!!!In one of the final scenes we see him so disappointed that he wasn't able to barbarically kill a goat with his own hands in the name of his faith, that he travels from Saudi Arabia to India to finish his salvation. After this very disturbing scene, he then realizes that what he just did was terribly violent and wrong, yet he finishes out the film praising the same ghost who told him to sacrifice an innocent goat in the first place. This film is full of reasons why Islam is a religion to abandon quickly. Unfortunately here, the lessons were completely lost on our narrator.

Parvez Sharma (who made this movie) is a gay Muslim. That, in itself, made this interesting. It seems contradictory. However what really appealed to me was the promise that this film seemed to make to give the viewer a look at Mecca - the holiest city of Islam, located in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia itself seems strange and distant enough. Mecca is actually closed to non-Muslims, which gives it a sort of "forbidden fruit" appeal even to me, as a Christian. I can't go there, but what would I find if I did? Sharma's film promised to give me a glimpse of this off-limits city.Some of the film is shot in New York, where Sharma lives with his boyfriend, and it depicts a bit of their relationship up to their marriage. I really didn't find that particularly interesting. Some of the film is also set in Sharma's birthplace in India. Some of that is interesting. But for the most part the movie is set in Mecca. Sharma travels there for the Hajj - the pilgrimmage that every Muslim is required to make to the Holy City. I assume that filming in Mecca is discouraged if not illegal, because Sharma uses only a cell phone camera and seems to be filming clandestinely. We do get to see a lot of Mecca through his cell phone. Some of it is very beautiful. I appreciated the look inside the Al-Masjid al-Haram Mosque and at the Kabbah, traditionally the first house of worship for Islam, built by Abraham. There's something transfixing about watching the ritual of pilgrims circling the Kabbah. I can understand how that could actually be a powerful spiritual experience for some. Some of the other rituals, including the symbolic stoning of the devil, are shown. This gave me a better understanding of the Hajj - what it's about and what it tries to accomplish. At the same time it's rather jarring to see the commercialism that now accompanies the pilgrimmage (the shopping centre apparently connected to the mosque struck me as very un- Islamic) and the reflections on the amount of garbage the pilgrims leave littering the street and the question of how that shows respect for Allah was interesting.I could appreciate Sharma's courage - in filming things he wasn't supposed to be filming, but also simply in being a gay Muslim in Mecca - which likely would not have been well received if anyone had known. It seemed clear that Sharma also struggled with being a gay Muslim and was trying in some ways to come to peace with his own faith. Personally, I thought there was too much filler revolving around his relationship with his boyfriend in New York. That didn't interest me at all. But I did come away from this feeling as though I had a better understanding of the Hajj.

Having watched this filmmakers previous film A Jihad for Love, I was very curious to see this. Just saw it on Netflix and the film is still haunting me. This is probably one of the most morally complex and visually rich documentaries I have ever seen. The courage of the filmmaker is never in doubt, his morality as it relates to Islam is. This film takes us on an extraordinary journey through the protagonist who is also the filmmaker. Mecca and Medina in Saudi Arabia come remarkably alive through his hidden cellphone footage.There is a visceral, dreamlike quality throughout and the filmmaker is not afraid of cinematic abstraction. The film remarkably avoids self indulgence which would be easy given its nature. The love story that lies at the heart of the film is beautifully depicted. An unknown world in Saudi Arabia opens up to us and the result is like we too are clandestine viewers--we are disobediently peeping into the forbidden. The musical choices are remarkable--he even uses heavy metal at one point. Many sequences are extremely hard to watch but they are underlined by a deep dignity. Being mostly shot on an iPhone as the voice over tells us could be a distraction but the filmmaker actually turns it into one of the biggest assets of the film. We become witnesses to a forbidden journey that is built carefully like a thriller spanning New York, Saudi Arabia and India. I personally come out of this film more enlightened and with a strong feeling that I have witnessed something I was not meant to see. The Hajj of the film is visceral and brutal. But in Mecca there is also peace and completion. My only peeve with the film: he could have chosen to show more of his life as a gay Muslim man married to an atheist and living in New York.

It's pretty obvious from the low IMDb ranking overall that zealotry will be a dominating force in the discussion over this film, which is a shame. Objectively it's not as substantive a movie as I would've liked. It swings pretty haphazardly from personal home movies, to attempts at poetic visual memoir, to the hajj itself (by far the most interesting bits), all shot on an iPhone, which while necessary for the undercover filmmaking in the Kingdom, doesn't add a very strong visual presence to the other 70% of the flick. There's some very brief exploration of how Wahhabist ideas came to gain such a strong foothold across much of the faith but that takes a backseat to Thanksgiving dinner footage and other humanizing, but pretty boring filler. All and all it doesn't deserve the extremely low ranking it's sporting now, simply as an act of personal filmmaking it has some value, but it's also not really that strong a work considering how interesting the subject matter is. One thing is certain, we need more love in the world.