“Rabia” by Mareike Engelhardt

Taken from the site The educational café

November 27, 2024

Reading suggested by André Cloutier

By choosing to represent in cinema the ‘madafa’ of sinister memory (never photographed or filmed at the time), suggesting the closed doors of a place of confinement, oppression and conditioning to the submission of women, a space stifling film directed with an iron fist by a fanatical woman, director Mareike Engelhardt, attempts to answer the initial question and raises many others, intimate and universal. She formulates its scope in these terms: “ It is not a film about Islam, about jiadism but about mass recruitment, the mechanisms of dehumanization…”. Where does it come from, in fact, that Jessica can choose the path of the executioners?

At the origins of fiction, historical context, testimonies, expertise

It was following the capture of the city of Raqqa in 2014 that the Islamic State imposed Sharia law on all inhabitants and launched a call to come from all sides to support the creation of a ‘Caliphate’. While Daesh (another name for the Islamist terrorist organization) consolidates its hold on Raqqa in Syria at war, thousands of radicalized young people (in a few months for some) from all over the world, from diverse backgrounds, are joining this ‘country ‘ idyllic in the illusion of total commitment and the promise of a new life.

Girls, sometimes very young, losing their senses, leave in secret from their parents towards an unknown land, blinded by the absolutism of their belief. A romantic imagination (going so far as to desire a Djiad fighter as a husband) and an ideological regimentation such that some have never left, even those who returned to their country of origin.

The totalitarian nature of this crazy criminal enterprise, and the singular involvement of women within it, lead the filmmaker to an in-depth investigation into what she calls ‘the incomprehensible’. Meetings with women who had stayed for a certain time in Raqqa with the Islamic State and remained, after their return, filled with hatred of others and a spirit of revenge, presence at the hearings of the trials of certain girls at the Court of Paris, cross-checking of information concerning the status and lifestyle of women in the ‘madafas’, investigation into the personality of the infamous Fathia Mejjaati (known as Oum Adam), a rigorous dominatrix and sadist, still on the run today, who inspired the character of Madame (masterfully interpreted by the great Lubna Azabal), recourse to the expertise of two specialists in female jihadism, Céline Martelet and Edith Bouvier, who enriched with their knowledge the work of the actresses during preparation. Without forgetting the supervised confrontations with former ‘residents’ of these places of confinement and indoctrination.

From radiant sun to darkness, aesthetics of light, bias

On the plane that takes them to Raqqa, Jessica (Megan Northam, actress impressive with her presence and the power of her acting) and Laïla (moving incarnation of Natacha Krief) contemplate the bright sun above the white clouds, with radiant smiles. and with the laughter of little girls, they make allusions to the paradise that awaits them. The clouds melt together into a creamy mass invading our entire field of vision.

Then, before landing, the clouds change color. And we enter with them into a fortress-shaped house and quickly detect the first signs of a framework of enslavement, signs that our two enthusiastic friends do not see.

Thus we follow the rituals imposed inside this strange gynoecium: the women among themselves, on orders, are little by little stripped of their old identity (and their original clothing) to be prepared both psychologically for submission to religious precepts and prohibitions decreed by the Islamic state; and physically (change of underwear for seductive semi-nudity and makeup, soon masked under a veil covering body and hair) to become sexual objects at the mercy of the impulses of warriors and future spouses; husbands chosen for them for a meeting of a few hours upon returning from the front.

A first contact which can transform, after some preliminaries (take off your veil! Do you want children? Do you like apricots?), into attempted rape as Jessica experienced early on.

A significant ordeal which leads her to brutally repel the attacker and escape. However, a prelude to a major reversal. Instead of coming out of her blindness, she gradually moves into the camp of the dominatrix, a fan of corporal punishment, humiliating diktats and other injunctions to respect male superiority, including domestic violence; a fanatical and manipulative mistress who trains her so that she in turn becomes a weapon for training new arrivals.

Over time, in an atmosphere of war in which the battlefield (and the dead) remains off-screen just as the physical violence against women inside is excluded from the frame even if we hear the muffled blows and screams, the white of the sky above the fortress and the ocher whiteness of the distance without visible armed men disappear more and more.

Then the indirect and veiled lights coming down from the windows and the subdued glow of the interior spaces of the madafa up to Madame’s apartments dominate a brighter and more spacious time. Before chiaroscuro in biased lights in the heart of this place from which it is forbidden to leave under the light of the stars, the forest of black veils, those of oppressed women, melt into the black of the bombings heralding the fall of Raqqa , until the entrance into darkness.

Rabia’s mental space and universal questioning

With Agnès Godard, the director of photography, and Daniel Bevan for the decor, the filmmaker thus creates a mental space favorable to the representation of the intimate ‘revolution’ which occurs in Jessica, who has become Rabia thanks to this shift into the executioners’ camp. Through this formal research, the director attempts to give us access, without complacency, to the trajectory of Rabia and other women who resemble her in the master/slave relationship, in the ambiguous relationship to domination.

Mareike Engelhardt claims her German origin and her belonging to ‘the last generation that knew those who participated in one of the worst crimes of humanity’.

While clearly refusing shortcuts between Islamist terrorism and Nazism, based on a story imagined with screenwriter Samuel Doux, the cutting, blood-curdling fiction forces us to a deeply disturbing reflection to which the filmmaker incites us thus: ‘ What makes us turn to the wrong side over the course of a lifetime? How is it possible to be absorbed by a system that takes away our humanity? And above all, why do people stay there?’.

The last scene of the film sees Jessica/Rabia, with a child in her arms, reduced to a distant and tiny silhouette, on the verge of merging with the arid soil of a lifeless land.

Samra Bonvoisin

“Rabia”, film by Mareike Engelhardt – released November 27, 2024

Festivals and Prizes 2024: FFA, Angoulême (Competition), Deauville (Ornano-Valenti Prize), Valenciennes (Jury Prize), War on screen (Public Prize), Arte Mare (Public Prize and Special Mention Young Jury) , Effervescence of Mâcon (Public Prize).

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