Writer Javaad Alipoor says a small screen will enhance the message of The Believers Are But Brothers
A disturbing film that recreates the look and content of extremist internet sites to show how young people, mostly men, are drawn into dangerous online worlds is to premiere on BBC Four on Sunday as part of a series of programmes to mark the birth of the world wide web 30 years ago. But the writer and performer behind the film argues it should be watched on a laptop for greatest impact.
“I try not to make work that is either negative or positive, but just to look at what we do,” said Javaad Alipoor. “Now I have made a film that is very playful with the nature of the screens you are watching. No one I know watches on a TV set now, and I have made my film expecting most people to watch on their laptops.”
Alipoor’s film, The Believers Are But Brothers, is adapted from his recent award-winning and controversial play of the same title, but promises a closer approximation of what some disaffected young adults experience when they are groomed by jihadist or far-right terrorists and extremists.
The play used audience members’ mobile phones to highlight their dependency on their screens. Alipoori, 34, who grew up in Bradford, said: “Moving to the screen from the stage has given me the opportunity to say something about the nature of screens as a locus of fantasy.”
Billed by the BBC as “an urgent political riff” that “steps into the dark, blurry online world of fantasists and extremists”, his film tells the fictional stories of an Isis recruiter, two British recruits and a far-right “white boy” from California. Alipoor said he viewed young men’s interactions with the internet, from gaming, to chat rooms, to propaganda, “as profoundly religious”.
“We haven’t yet really begun to get our hands on which way social media is taking us,” he said. “There are certain stories we tell each other about the web. Do you remember that breathless moment on Twitter in 2011, with the Arab spring, when we thought it was driving it? And then the story was taken over with all the darker stuff, like the Cambridge Analytica revelations.”
Alipoor said his film was about the resentment young men often experience, but admitted the web had also brought some good. “We have to remember #MeToo was born on social media, so some things are getting better.”
