‘Rebel’ Is a Harrowing Portrait of the Human Toll of ISIS and the Syrian Civil War

Alci Rengifo

Great and terrible historical events always have a human toll easily looked over when they become mere headlines. In 2014, ISIS (Islamic State in Iraq & Syria), the fanatical Islamist militant group, stormed the Iraqi border with Syria and expanded its heretical, violent Caliphate. It was the bloodiest chapter yet in the ongoing Syrian Civil War. From other corners of the world, Muslims, in particular young men, felt the urge to travel to Syria and join a movement that sowed fear in the West with its slick propaganda exporting images of horrific violence. “Rebel” is the first great film to tackle not only ISIS, but how it impacted immigrant communities in Europe. It confirms directors Adil El Arbi and Bilall Fallah as unique artists who can balance craft with eloquence. “I had seen first-hand the effects of what was happening in Europe,” Fallah tells Entertainment Voice. “People I played soccer with were leaving and going to Syria. The question was, ‘why is this happening?’ And then when attacks started happening in Belgium and France, it was shocking and emotional for us as Muslims. That inspired the feeling that we had to tell this story.”

The narrative begins with Kamal (Aboubakr Bensaihi), who once lived in Belgium with mother Leila (Lubna Azabal) and younger brother Nassim (Amir El Arbi). He’s essentially thrown out of the house when the police uncover his connection to drug running. When the Syrian war erupts following an uprising against the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad, Kamal sees the brutality of the regime’s violence on the news and travels to Syria to become an aid worker. Hope is easy to lose amid the bombs and human suffering and one night, Kamal is rounded up by Islamic State militants and absorbed into their organization. With experience in video, he soon becomes a videographer for the group as it storms across towns, executing Assad’s soldiers and anyone resisting the violent new order. Back home, Nassim yearns to know of his brother’s whereabouts and comes into the orbit of recruiters who paint a romanticized vision of Kamal’s journey detached from its hopelessness. 

“Rebel” brings such a human dimension to a topic that has been explored with single brushstrokes in the media. The Syrian Revolution’s descent into civil war is like a darker cousin of the Spanish Civil War, when idealists like Hemingway and Orwell made their way to Europe to join the fight against fascism. In a post-ideological time, the banners of extremism attracted many from around the world for different reasons, for a cause that knew how to present itself despite its known adherence to a heretical form of Sunni Islam. Having lived these events in person, Arbi and Fallah, who met as film students in Belgium, approach the material with a unique and palpable passion. “When I see a lot of TV shows and movies touching on this, you never get the Muslim perspective,” says Fallah. “We wanted to tell this story with all the complexities and nuances. We’ve been working on this actually for eight years. Though the war was taking place in Syria and we were in Belgium, it felt like we were experiencing the war ourselves. It really is a story that is almost a decade old so we tried to create a document to show all the sides of what this war meant.”

Arbi and Fallah are best known as the directors of “Bad Boys for Life” and episodes of Disney’s “Ms. Marvel,” where they displayed a talent for stylish, energetic work. But “Rebel” is something else, a film that is riveting through its powerful dimensions. There is a poetic approach to the way its sections are divided into the equivalent of cantos. Stunning sequences break from traditional narrative to tell the story through song and dance numbers using Arabic hip-hop (performed by lead actor Bensaihi). In one such sequence Kamal raps in a night spot that turns into one powerful expression of how the despair over Assad’s brutality in Syria combines with the sense of alienation Muslim immigrants experience in Europe, somehow churning into the stew that leads one to radical belief systems. “Right from the start we were thinking of how to convey the emotion,” says Arbi. “How do you convey the sorrow and the madness? We realized normal dialogue won’t do it. There’s something about music and poetry that touches the audience on a higher level. It transcends the normal ways of telling the story. Music and dance are an important part of Arab and Muslim culture and ISIS was of course against all that. They prohibited dancing and female music. So we’re also saying that doesn’t represent us. They are wrong, we are right and that’s why we have those songs, those dance numbers in there to tell the story. It’s the best way to resist what ISIS represents.”

Kamal’s journey into the world of ISIS is indeed its own harrowing inferno with familiar scenes from the headlines now brought to intimate life of how the group imposed a strict code of law involving beheadings and suppression of women. But Arbi and Fallah are good enough storytellers where they strive to capture the complexities of such a situation. Kamal also witnesses the sense of camaraderie between many of the militants swept into this ideology. There are recruits arriving from Chechnya and even Brazil. Searing battle sequences filmed with a stark grittiness show how the need to survive also brings you closer to unlikely people. His will is then tested when he’s given a wife from a group of captured women, Noor (Tara Abboud), as a prize for saving a commander’s life. Because Kamal deep down doesn’t want to be a part of this blood-soaked enterprise, Noor becomes his first push towards considering how to break free. Instead of turning their situation into cornball romance, the directors raise them to the heights of classic, devastating tragedy. Cinematographer Robrecht Heyvaert, who has lensed slick imagery before for these filmmakers, approaches this war story with the eye of an artist.

The narrative then returns to Belgium, where the Muslim community faces internal divisions over fringe elements trying to infiltrate mosques and attack imams for teaching tolerance and peace. Here the story reaches one its most potent, heartbreaking angles. Leila begins to realize now young Nassim is being lured by recruiters brainwashing local youth with testosterone-pumped fantasies of what life is like fighting for Islamic State in faraway Syria. It’s a frightening manipulation of Nassim’s desire to see Kamal again. Like the best films of directors like Costa-Gavras and Oliver Stone, Arbi and Fallah combine the historical with the personal, then placing it all on an epic canvas. Through Leila’s eventual journey to try and save her family, she too witnesses the terrible intricacies of the Syrian conflict, at one point ending up in a zone controlled by the YPG, the leftist Kurdish militants who were also part of both the uprising and subsequent battle against ISIS. None of it is approached like an archaic history lesson, but as lives being lived in wrenching times. It was the same for Central Americans fleeing to the U.S. from the civil wars of the 1980s and is the same now for Ukrainians escaping their own cataclysm.

Movies like “Rebel” rarely get made, and it will sadly not receive the same press as disposable nonsense releasing this month, like “Expend4bles.” Yet, it is inspiring to see directors like Arbi and Fallah, who had a big hit with “Bad Boys for Life” and recently made headlines for their controversially shelved “Batgirl,” take their success and make a daring, personal work such as this. They end the movie with a rush of striking inspiration, with a dance number that somehow captures all of the tragedy, epic human journey, heartbreak and fear of the storm that envelops their characters and continues to impact an entire region. Hopefully, other directors will follow their lead. “For us this movie is for everyone and is also an Arab movie,” says Arbi. “We filmed in Jordan, which is of course close to Syria and Iraq. We met so many talents there in front and behind the camera. We’re seeing more talent coming from that corner of the world telling their own stories with their own actors. Before, they were relegated to just being side characters in the western view. Now we’re moving ahead and telling daring, complex stories that we couldn’t imagine ten years ago. It’s a rising up and I hope we’re a part of that.”

“Rebel” releases Sept. 22 in select theaters.