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.

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.

Most of the reviewers who left negative reviews did so because they expected this to be a documentary that vilifies Mark and provides all the saucy and morbid details of everything that they assume he's done. But this documentary is not about that. This documentary is about the hurt that he caused in a community that is already heavily targeted, and how his friends are coping and trying to understand his actions. It touches on how a fairly normal kid can go rogue given the right circumstances and it humanises that fact. After reading some of the reviews it seems that a lot of people are not interested in knowing how terrorism affects Muslim communities in the US, but I found it a very touching and raw account from a perspective we don't often see.

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.