With Rabia [+lee también:
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entrevista: Mareike Engelhardt
ficha de la película], Mareike Engelhardt addresses the process of dehumanisation behind the indoctrination of an army of young women, submitted to forced procreation by Daesh. In her film, out on 27 November in France through Memento and today in Belgium with Cinéart, she follows Jessica, now going by Rabia, and takes us to the heart of a mafada, these houses that welcome women to the behind-the-scenes of the war led by the Islamic state in Raqqa.

Cineuropa: What was the spark at the origin of the project?
Mareike Engelhardt: I am German and the grand-daughter of a Nazi, and I am very troubled by the question of ideology. How do we take the wrong path in our lives, how does one become a persecutor? What would I have done at that time? I wanted to force the spectator to ask themselves that question too.

What are the circumstances that make that dehumanisation possible?
It isn’t the war that the Islamic State is selling to young people. The propaganda is aimed at much more noble emotions, the desire for our life to have meaning, to belong to a family, to be loved. Certainly, one must go through war, but only in order to reach peace. There are incredible problems of social injustice in our societies. Over there, everyone is on equal footing, in service of God. These young people want to get involved, to fight for something. It’s disturbing to think that our Western societies seem to no longer offer these perspectives to young people, that there is an absence of utopia which makes it so that they are tempted by Jihad, to the point of thinking that a country at war and under a totalitarian regime could offer them a better world.

Rabia leaves a place where she feels enslaved for another where she will be as well. The system feeds on her hurt.
It’s something that people working in deradicalisation centres highlight, and which comes up in the scene where Madame explains that we must find what the person lacks and try to give it to them. These people who leave have a lack, a breach, and a very precise need. It’s often a parent’s absence, or a trauma related to sexual violence. Like all cult leaders, Madame is very good at finding this breach and inserting herself there.

The film begins in a big sorority, like a holiday camp, but very quickly, violence spreads throughout the group.
They arrive as friends, but very quickly turn into rivals. They are submitted to speed-dating, where the men choose their spouse. They are compared and thus opposed. It’s a system of survival. Those who remain in the house and don’t get married, like Jessica, must find their place in a different way than through men. So Jessica finds her place with the director – a place that gives her a lot of power, but which costs her her humanity.

These girls go to fight in a war, but they find themselves in the backstage area instead. They are at once excluded and locked up. The war is off-screen.
I really didn’t want to recreate these horrible images we all have in mind. The girls are fed propaganda through these screens. By staying in the house, I wanted to focus on my characters’ psychology. I’ve seen a lot of films about the El with men screaming “Allah Akbar”, but never these women’s houses from the inside, and the stakes that are related to them.

How does one approach such a sensitive subject? How does one find the right distance and point of view?
First by having a personal look at it. What is it that makes me, Mareike, interested in it, and how does that give me my legitimacy? I chose not to tell the story of a girl I have met, but instead to build a character from several testimonies I’ve collected, and to share the questions I am asking myself, regarding life, my country, my family. I did so by stepping as far away from Islam as possible in the mise en scène – the veils could be Catholic ones, the gestures are close to those of nazism. I took inspiration from several totalitarian systems to say something more universal about humanity, about our ability to turn into monsters.