Ghosts of Sugar Land

I enjoyed this very short documentary despite the fact that it had no apparent structure or objective. I think it missed a great opportunity to explain in depth why his closest friends think this man radicalised,how it impacted their lives and how they think it could have been avoided.

"Suburban Muslims have to learn to live with the consequences of a close friend's actions." That's the official synopsis, yet the documentary is purely just a pointless discussion among uninformed individuals speculating what happened of the 'close friend', without even exploring anything substantial.

The only thing interesting about this documentary is that the interviewees wear superhero masks - supposedly to 'protect' themselves. That too is rendered pointless as it's not like these people are divulging any sensitive information that would affect themselves negatively. Plus, the ill-fit masks are poor disguises and ultimately ineffective without any voice-modulation.

The whole mask thing just seems like a gimmick to incite our inherent excitement and intrigue of controversial topics.

The documentary fails to inform us audiences about what really happened (how and why the friend became involved with ISIS and its extremism), and the whole topic is guided by the interviewed subjects who themselves are very uninformed and are pointlessly speculating about the friend and his fate.

The filmmakers glossed over several aspects and information that would've made this documentary more interesting, especially about the involvement of FBI informants in American Muslim societies and the possibility of the friend being an informant himself.

How this ended up being a winner at Sundance, I have no idea. At the end, this uninformed documentary doesn't attempt to look deeper into the truth or reveal anything pertaining to case. Neither does it really show how the Muslim Americans are affected by the incident discussed. It'll just make you scratch your head at what the point watching this incredibly short documentary was.

I had never heard about this, but it reminded me of an article talking about radicalized teens/young adults in the states. It was pretty good for a 20 min film.

This documentary was a good view of what it's like to be a young Muslim in USA after 9/11. Also, the heartbreaking feelings behind "Mark´s" friends masks fill all documentary scenario. However, the documentary has very few substance/information. Indeed, it explains almost nothing about why "Mark" became extremist and why his friends thought he was an FBI spy.

This is a pretty cheap and baffling documentary. It seems as though the documentarian saw that there was a glimmer of something interesting, threw together a few quick shooting sessions, and then wrapped right before anything interesting happened.

What is this about? Is it about Muslim Americans in the suburban south grappling with prejudice after 9/11? If so, there's really no insight beyond what every American would've already known some 17+ years ago. The 10ish middle aged male interview subjects, who all have their faces masked for reasons that are never really clear, don't really dig deep into their personal experiences or share anything especially reflective or intimate. It's hard to empathize with a mask--harder still when the voice coming from behind the mask is saying fairly surface-level, gossipy things? If this is a movie about how Muslims of Middle Eastern and Asian descent experience life in America, then the revelations are pretty dull.

This movie could have been an examination of Sugar Land, Texas. The title suggests that the locale bears some importance, but the film fails to deliver. We learn that Sugar Land is very diverse in every aspect except for African Americans, and we see yearbook pages full of teenagers of European, East Asian, South Asian, and Middle Eastern descent along with a solitary young black man, who is the center of the film's focus. What are the historical roots of that demographic diversity? How does that play out in the local culture? The film provides no historical context, no maps or statistics, no local news clips, no interviews with city government officials or business owners or law enforcement. I imagine that any of these things could have illuminated exactly what this part of the country is like... but no.

So I suppose what this movie is really about is a young black man who became radicalized by a combination of toxic internet discourse and not having any place to belong in his community. The movie begins by developing a pseudonym for this central character, yet he's the only person whose face isn't blurred out of the photographs. The text at the end reveals why that's so, but that text also suggests that we could have been watching a different, much more interesting film all this time. Instead of baseless conjecture and the gossipy accusations of anonymous social media friends, we could have been exploring the actual history of this man. Perhaps we could have heard from his family, from other black people in the community... something. That would've been more interesting than what this film is.

I'm willing to concede that maybe the point is to reveal something hypocritical about the masked interview subjects--that we're supposed to find ourselves identifying not with them but with the mysterious man at the center, who's given a face and a name but no actual voice. But if that's the point, then the film tries too hard and succeeds at very little.