“The whole purpose of making the film for me was I wanted to try and see if I can understand them, and I want to see if they’re able to understand me…I know I’m not going to change my views and I know he’s not going to change his, but can we at least get to a point where…can I recognize their humanity? And in doing so, can they recognize mine?” -Deeyah Khan, Award-Winning Documentary Film Director
Deeyah Khan is an Emmy and Peabody award-winning documentary film director, and founder of Fuuse, a media and arts company that puts women, people from minorities, and third-culture kids at the heart of telling their own stories. Deeyah is working to create intercultural dialogue and understanding by confronting the world's most complex and controversial topics.
Her 2012 multi-award winning documentary, Banaz: A Love Story, chronicles the life and death of Banaz Mahmod, a young British Kurdish woman murdered by her family in a so-called honor killing. Khan's second film, the Grierson and Bafta award-nominated Jihad, involved two years of interviews and filming with Islamic extremists, convicted terrorists and former jihadis. Her most recent documentary White Right: Meeting the Enemy, where she spends months getting to know neo-nazis, is currently streaming on Netflix. Her 2016 TED talk has over a million views.
In the process of making these documentaries and throughout her life as a brown woman, Deeyah has been spit on, held at gun point, and received countless rape and death threats. Yet she still walked away from these films with optimism and hope for humanity. In this interview of Stories of Transformation, we get to understand why that is.
A few highlights of our conversation are:
-Why some people respond to injustice with violence while others, like Deeyah, respond with picking up a camera
-How Deeyah ended up in a crappy Chinese buffet in NYC right after receiving an Emmy for her first ever film Banaz
-What powerful insights Deeyah learned through spending months interviewing Neo-Nazis, Jihads, and other extremists
-How Deeyah overcame her fear when face to face with her biggest enemies
-What happened when she joined some white supremacists at one of their rallies
-The number one thing she learned about how we should engage with those that have a completely different worldview than ourselves
-Who (or what), Deeyah learned, is actually our greatest enemy
Read full show notes here.
Connect with Deeyah Khan
Twitter: https://twitter.com/Deeyah_Khan
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/deeyahkhan/
Website: https://deeyah.com/
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Produced by: Dana Drahos
Edited by: Joseph Gangemi