Gay filmmaker Parvez Sharma knew making a hajj was an obligation for Muslims. He also knew that in Mecca, being gay can result in a death sentence. And, yes, he knew that most filming is forbidden in the holy city.
But he went anyway and documented that death-defying religious journey in “A Sinner in Mecca,” out Sept. 4.
“Thankfully I was not hauled into prison,” the New York-based Sharma said of his 2011 pilgrimage, which he began shortly after his finishing his first film, “A Jihad for Love.”
He took an iPhone 4S and two small HP cameras that looked like flip phones into Saudi Arabia with him. In his first week in Mecca — he was there for almost a month — he was often spotted filming by religious police.
PARVEZ SHARMA
Parvez Sharma’s second movie is “A Sinner in Mecca” and features extensive and rare footage inside the holy city. Also, he’s openly gay, which is a big no-no in Saudi Arabia.
“They walk around with these batons and some of them hit you with them if you are doing something that is not allowed,” Sharma says. “I was at the wrong end of that stick a lot of times.”
Sharma remained in Mecca’s ultimate closet — being gay and being a filmmaker — but came out as both to just one pilgrim, a Muslim doctor from Alabama. The doctor asked Sharma why he wanted to be part of a religion that wanted nothing to do with him.
Sharma didn’t have an answer then, but now he does.
“It is not a question of whether Islam will accept me,” says Sharma, who explored similar issues of faith and sexuality in his first film. “The question is if I accept Islam, and I do — but on my own terms.”
Sharma’s faith is not the Saudi-sanctioned version — he’s got beef with it.
Saudi Arabia is systematically destroying the history of Islam and transforming Mecca into a different kind of mecca: a capitalist one.
The city is filled with construction cranes, new hotels and garish malls, Sharma says. Most tellingly, after Sharma made his first laps around the Kaaba shrine — a religious rite going back thousands of years — he left the Al-Masjid al-Haram mosque and got coffee at a Starbucks across the street.
“I cannot believe that,” Sharma says in the film.
People have filmed the hajj and Mecca before — an all-Muslim crew working for Spike Lee notably filmed parts of “Malcolm X” in Mecca in the early 90s — but Sharma says his film is the only movie to show the real Mecca, the one the Saudis “don’t want you to see.”
“It is reporting from the street level,” Sharma says. “It’s a sort of expose of what it’s really like in that world.”
“A Sinner in Mecca,” Cinema Village, 22 E. 12th St., opens Sept. 4. For info., visit /2015/06/soule-celebrates-black-music-month-rob-b/
Original Post: NYDailynews
Author: ALIZA CHASAN