ScreenFish

where faith and film are intertwined

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Two Gods – Who Will You Follow?

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“Surely we belong to God and to Him we shall return.”

In Zeshawn Ali’s Two Gods we see the struggles of people dealing with violence in their lives and neighborhoods. The documentary set mostly in Newark, New Jersey, focuses on Hanif, a Muslim casket maker and ritual body washer. Hanif knows the dangers of the streets. He ended up in prison at one point. He seems to have found meaning in his work. He approaches it with respect for the dead.

Hanif has taken two young men under his wing to try to mentor them into adulthood. Furquan is twelve years old, and comes from a violent home. Naz is seventeen and getting involved with dangerous activity, which eventually results in his arrest on very serious charges.

The back and white cinematography creates a stark world where violence is a constant presence. From time to time we encounter not only funerals, but the community workers who are trying to end the large number of violent deaths among young people. It is this that Hanif is trying to protect Naz and Furquan from.

It is important to note that Hanif is a religious man. He is frequently wearing t-shirts that say “Pray”. We see him in the mosque praying. And his approach to the bodies he prepares for burial is a form of religious observance. He feels blessed to be able to care for these bodies. Naz speak a bit about religion, but it doesn’t seem to be important to him. Furquan in time finds himself in his aunt’s home in North Carolina and being part of a Christian church there.

The filmmaker’s view is that all three of these men are struggling between the worship of God and of the streets. That is a fair description of what many people deal with each day. It doesn’t necessarily have to mean choosing God or violence. It can be about anything that draws us away from God. It could be money, sex, fame, drugs, success, or power. Those things can be a part of life, but when they dominate, they can become a different god to us.

Ali wants to show American Muslims as a part of our societal fabric. He does not make a case that Muslims are better than others or that Islam is superior, but he does want us to understand that we all share a common humanity. Indeed, he seems just as happy for Furquan finding a place in a Christian community as he with Hanif in his practice of Islam.

Two Gods is available in theaters and virtual cinema. It is coming soon to PBS’s “Independent Lens” series.

Photos by Zeshawn Ali.

The People vs. Agent Orange

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“[It] doesn’t go away. It goes away politically/”

Most of us associate Agent Orange with the Vietnam War. The defoliant was used extensively in that war, both to eliminate the cover of jungle and to destroy crops. It also became a major veterans’ issue, when many veterans contracted cancers. But The People vs. Agent Orange, a documentary from Alan Adelson and Kate Taverna, show us the ways Agent Orange continues to affect life, both in Vietnam and the US.

The film touches on the use of the chemicals in the war, and briefly on the veterans’ issues involves. But a good part of the film focuses on the use of Agent Orange by the timber industry in Oregon. After clear cutting, in order to replant whole hillsides, the logging companies would spray with Agent Orange before replanting. For the wildlife and the people who lived in that area, serious health and reproductive problems followed. People organized and sought to end it, only to face intimidation. But eventually the courts ordered a stop to the use of one of the two chemicals that made up Agent Orange.

The film also focuses on the price that is still being paid in Vietnam. Because dioxin, part of Agent Orange, does not go away—either in the land or the body—Vietnam continues to have a very high rate of serious birth defects. As a result, Tran To Nga, a Vietnamese woman, is suing the manufacturers in a French court, in order to seek accountability. (The U.S. courts have not allowed such a suit.)

This film is a look at a very important issue, but it failed to create a significant emotional response in me. In part that is because so much of the film seems to be ancient history. The events in Oregon took place forty or more years ago. There are still effects, and one of the key components is still being used there, but the film doesn’t really bring the problem to the present, except with the children with deformities in Vietnam.

The film also fails to provide all the links needed to fully make its case. For example, the chemical that includes dioxin is not longer used in Oregon, but the film fails to provide sufficient evidence that the remaining chemical being used is also damaging to the environment. (I don’t doubt it is, but the film doesn’t prove it.)

Because it is so much based in the past, the film can’t really serve as a call to arms against an injustice. Nga’s attempt to hold companies accountable is a noble effort, but it’s not really something we can get behind. The real problem, which the film doesn’t really get into, is an overall inability to hold companies liable for the harm they do. This is really a political issue as much as a legal one. That is an area that people can seek change. But that’s not where the film leads us.

The People vs. Agent Orange is available via virtual cinema through local theaters.