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Documentary filmmaker Amar Wala tackles the subject of Canadian anti-terrorism and hope to shed light on the treatment of Muslims held by the federal government on suspicion of terrorist links with his film Secret Trial 5.
The project started as a final assignment for Wala to finish film school at York University over five years ago. A professor had suggested the subject matter to be the experiences of Ahmed Jaballah, who as a 12-year-old, acted as an interpreter and saw his father Mahmoud being taken away by Canadian Security Intelligence Agency (CSIS) agents.
The project eventually turned into the story of five men who were suspected of terrorist links, and the ordeals they and their families had to go through for over a decade due to the federal government’s security certificate program. They detention included both house arrest and prison time, and none of them were ever charged with a crime and never got to see or challenge the evidence which was used to label them as security threats.
“As Canadians . . . this felt like something that was happening south of the border. When I heard it was happening here, it kind of blew my mind. I almost didn’t believe it. Our hope is to get people a little bit angry at what’s being done, so that the word about security certificates spreads through the Canadian populace. This is something that we don’t know happens in our own country”, Wala said.
Only two of the five, Adil Charkaoui and Hassan Almrei, were able to successfully get their certificates rescinded after a long legal process; Almrei had spent seven years in jail by the end of it all, five of them in solitary confinement.
“I was not a very overly political person as a young person. This kind of just grabbed a hold of me because of the human story. I’m not a Muslim, so I never related to these people on a cultural level. It was just more of a very basic principle”, Wala said.
Wala, who came to Canada from India along with his family when he was 11 years old, added that though Canadians must accept the reality of terrorism in a post 9/11 age, the federal government’s approach is unsatisfactory at every level.
“If a person has committed a crime, people can process that. There’s a way to gain closure. But in this process, you never gain closure because you never know whether the person is innocent or guilty. There’s no end to the process, it just keeps going”, he said.
Despite his findings, he said that he hasn’t come out of the experience with a sense of paranoia.
“If the government is looking into me, they’re going to see a lot of sports and fantasy football stats on my computer. I don’t think they’re worried about me. At the end of the day, we’re filmmakers. I haven’t faced any scrutiny and I don’t feel I’m on any list”, he added.