Bridging an Ethical Divide: Islamophobia, Harm and Repair in Film Curation
By Karim Ahmad
The non-profit media arts industry has an accountability problem. The institutions that make up this field do exceptional work uplifting artists individually and collectively, yet inevitable oversights occur. For example, inauthentic, stereotypical, or even harmful depictions of marginalized peoples might perhaps be supported with funding, a valuable programming slot, and thus an institutional stamp of approval, which enables this depiction to have a wider audience in the marketplace, and can cause very real harm to the community it portrays. And it is in the handling of this inevitable, understandable, yet very real harm that many of our artist support organizations fall short. The reality is that the creation of harm is an unfortunate yet inevitable side effect of living in the world — organizations are made up of humans, and humans make mistakes, in spite of good intentions and honorable mission statements. Thus there is no shame in creating harm, as long as individuals and organizations are willing to hold themselves accountable — because no external force can in reality “make” anyone else accountable for anything they don’t want to be held accountable for — and take commensurate reparative action. And it is in this act of reparation — the centering of harm that a community has experienced, and the willingness to put the public image of the organization second to the health of its constituents — that many artist support organizations are failing us. Some of these failings are small, some are larger, and many of us experienced both in 2022, especially those of us that are Muslim.
Industry Islamophobia
For context, Muslims are among the most invisible and stigmatized communities in the country, an unfortunate fact that Muslims have known for decades, and was recently quantified in “Missing and Maligned”, a study commissioned by Pillars Fund and implemented by USC’s Annenberg Inclusion Initiative. It details (among many observations) how we are the most racially and geographically diverse faith group in the world, making up 24% of the world’s population (1.9 billion people). Yet the prevailing depictions of the community are racially homogenous (i.e., Arab), consistently told through the lens of the War on Terror and nearly unilaterally associated with violence. And as Pillars Fund accurately identifies, “violence against Muslims demonstrates dangerous biases on a global scale. While the causes of such violence are complex, mass media plays a worrying role in exacerbating negative stereotypes, especially when audiences have few real-world experiences with Muslim communities.”
And yet, attempts by Muslim filmmakers to correct these harmful prevailing narratives through the production of more authentic and nuanced depictions and stories have long been — and consistently still are — deprioritized by gatekeepers at legacy cultural institutions that provide the widest largest possible platform for narrative change. The root causes for this general lack of intentional support are, to my knowledge, relatively unexamined on a formal level. But in developing and audience-testing Muslim-centered narrative change projects, like our cross-platform anthology, Muslim Futures, our research has shown that these harmful associations of Muslims with violence are pervasive and exist across all demographic and cultural boundaries. In other words, otherwise-progressive, culturally literate social sectors (e.g., the film industry) are as susceptible to Islamophobic thinking as anyone else. But the marginalization of Muslims in my experience is rarely overt, rather, it is through ignorance, and intentional omission. For example, few artist support organizations even track the demographics of how many of their program applicants identify as Muslim. To be fair, few artist support organizations gather data on any faith-based demographic identities of their applicants, so the lack of data on Muslim applicants to any given artist program is by no means an aberration. But as also noted in “Missing and Maligned,” the Muslim community holds what I suspect is a rare place among faith-based groups in that it cites anti-Muslim hatred having reached “epidemic proportions” in American culture, so any lack of institutional artist support toward Muslims warrants much greater examination. More importantly though, the study’s findings highlight the manner in which even in seemingly more progressive, culturally literate, creative ecosystems like the media industry, ignorance and Islamophobia persist, and arts nonprofits are no exception.
The well-documented ethical filmmaking lapses and harmful depictions of Muslims in Jihad Rehab, directed by Meg Smaker, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2022, immediately come to mind. But this film is the tip of a very large iceberg. As detailed in a March 2022 Open Letter to the Sundance Film Festival, signed by a coalition of more than 200 filmmakers and culture workers, the authors conducted an informal study of Sundance’s programming of Muslim and MENASA (Middle Eastern, North African, or South Asian) themed films, and found that of 76 documentary films exhibited over 20 years, fewer than 35% were directed by Muslim or MENASA artists, only 4 films total topically covered Muslim life in the US, and of those, 2 narratively centered the War on Terror. So again, the lack of formal data gathering perhaps signals an intentional deprioritization and warrants further attention. And again, this is the tip of an even larger iceberg. Oversights like these are field wide, and they warrant focused self-examination and reparative action from all institutions. Just as many arts organizations have taken it upon themselves in the wake of 2020 to undergo racial equity analyses and trainings, or begin conducting accessibility audits of their operations to better support people with disabilities, so too must these organizations examine and correct the institutional Islamophobia that has become so apparent across our field, and most importantly, assess and subsequently repair ethical lapses in curatorial practices that may emerge in regards to any marginalized community. In other words, the pursuit of curatorial justice.
On Curatorial Justice
Curatorial justice is in many ways a final unmapped ethical wilderness that remains relatively unexamined in the media arts field on a wide scale. Yet for every harmful film created about the Muslim community — or any community — for it to inflict harm, it must also be programmed. And in this act of curation, an institution that holds power and prestige signals to its peers and to its audiences that this depiction of a community has value and is worthy of proliferation. This is a tremendous responsibility, and the more visible the platform, the greater that responsibility becomes. It then behooves any institution, out of respect for the communities they seek to serve, to take every precaution to ensure that a film is as responsibly made as possible before programming it. The question then becomes how? How can one ensure that a film is harmless before curating it for a large audience. The answer is of course, that you can’t “ensure” anything of the kind.
The responsibility of depicting a community is in fact too great to be safely held by any size cadre of programmers, small or large, and no matter how culturally abundant that cadre may be. No one person speaks for an entire community, and no two individuals’ lived experiences perfectly align. However, due diligence in community responsibility and ethical filmmaking are possible, and several community-rooted festivals are doing just that. This is why why in 2022, my organization Restoring the Future embarked upon a Curatorial Justice Project (thanks to the support of the Perspective Fund, Ford Foundation, and Open Society Foundations) to gather and synthesize the practices of programmers and organizations that are leading this work, in the hopes to co-create a framework and a toolkit of curatorial justice practices as a resource for the field. That report will be released this summer, but even early observations have been illuminating.
For example, many curatorial organizations advocate for, at minimum, a maximization of the insider cultural perspectives vetting a given film to assess as best as possible whether that film depicts a community in a harmful manner, or closer to the way they want to be seen by the world. Of course, the line between community responsibility and hagiography is important to distinguish, not always obvious, and experienced programmers will put a great deal of attention toward this distinction during vetting processes. However many programming teams are siloed by design even from their own institutional collaborators, as well as external subject matter experts or community partners, which inhibits their ability to widen the diversity of perspectives on any given film. This points to the need for a cultural shift in values around the work of programming — to dismantle these silos in the interest of maximizing community health and wellness.
Going further, some programming organizations are known to conduct ethical reviews of a project’s potential filmmaking oversights which may exacerbate harm to the immediate protagonists themselves, or communities they belong to. However, this practice is rare, and most often used only in the case of obvious red flags that arise in the usual programming process. Root causes of this oversight are not hard to identify. Few curatorial organizations have the time necessary to conduct robust investigations of all of the films submitted, or even the much smaller array of films that are competitive for final programming slots. They are simply not resourced effectively to do so. This then goes beyond an institutional problem and becomes a systemic one. In other words, we as a field must reboot and rebalance the way in which philanthropy and corporate sponsors can more effectively resource film festivals and other curatorial bodies to support the enhancement of their ethical and duty of care vetting practices. And this imperative holds true not just for the communities depicted on-screen. In recent years, there has been increasing fieldwide discourse around the various ways in which programmers and other film festival workers themselves are not well cared for or resourced to do what their jobs require, and our research supports this also.
Most importantly, when we as a field examine accountability in curation, we must ultimately all recognize that no matter how much due diligence any programming team implements, mistakes will inevitably be made, and thus a process for harm reduction and reparations must be put in place as well. These notions of accountability in the filmmaking industry are not new, and have been well designed and progressed by those in the Documentary Accountability Working Group, Detroit Narrative Agency, and others, as it regards reorienting the relationship between community and filmmaker. However, these same concepts of harm reduction also carry through to the curator, which again is a cultural shift. As noted earlier, our industry has an accountability problem. Our institutions are not accustomed to acknowledging the perpetration of harm, and we have seen over the last few years the way in which this damages relationships between institutions and their constituents, and creates barriers to healing within impacted communities. Yet this need not be so.
Toward Restorative Practices
This Curatorial Justice Project is one of the ways in which Restoring the Future hopes to co-create frameworks for practices across a variety of sectors in the media arts field that center harm reduction and utilize restorative justice practices to dismantle the stigma of institutional harm and find pathways and processes to facilitate healing between organizations and their constituents. Our models rely heavily on the expertise of our collaborators (in this case, BIPOC programmers and BIPOC-led film festivals), and a deep desire to reinvent standard operating procedures and recenter the values of the media arts field in a kinder, more transparent place. This deep desire to reinvent and restore is perhaps the most important element — and also the most difficult — for any organization seeking to reject the long history of harmful capitalist practices that have persisted across the nonprofit media arts field for so long. After all, we are seldom trained by our peers and supervisors to act in contrast with the self-interest and self-preservation of the institution in lieu of the wellbeing of any external body, constituent or not. But it is precisely this re-centering of the good of the commons over the needs of the individual or the institution that may hopefully, finally begin to heal the harm our institutions have for too long perpetrated toward Muslims and countless historically marginalized groups. Let’s begin.
Karim Ahmad is a writer, culture strategist, and organizer. He is the founder of Restoring the Future, an organization aimed at building a more abundant media arts system through restorative values practice, as well as the creator of the Muslim Futures project. He recently moderated Firelight Media’s Beyond Resilience: The Future of Film Programming.
