More stories

  • in

    Taylor Swift Returns to Stage for Eras Tour in London

    Fans at Wembley Stadium said they trusted British security officials to keep them safe and cheered loudly when the pop star came onstage.When Taylor Swift canceled three concerts in Vienna last week after officials there foiled a terrorist plot, Swifties soon expressed fears about the pop star’s next shows, in London.Would Swift go ahead with the concerts at Wembley Stadium? Given that the pop star once said her “biggest fear” was a terrorist attack at one of her shows, some fans had doubts. Was it even safe to attend?When Swift did not comment on the thwarted attack in Vienna or the upcoming London gigs, fan anxieties only grew.Yet when the singer took the stage on Thursday evening, worry gave way to excitement at the chance to see Swift perform during the European leg of her globe-spanning Eras Tour. As Swift walked onstage singing “It’s been a long time coming” — a refrain from her track “Miss Americana & The Heartbreak Prince” — the sold-out crowd cheered deliriously.She then launched into “Cruel Summer.”In the end, despite the interest in the Austrian plot, Swift did not refer to it even obliquely at the London show. Instead, she played an almost identical gig to the others on her Eras Tour, a joyous three-hour-plus spectacle featuring hits, costume changes and, at one point, a fake moss-covered wood cabin. For most of the concert, the 90,000 fans sang along to every word, including when she was joined by Ed Sheeran for an acoustic medley.In interviews before the show, more than a dozen fans, including many from the United States, all said they felt safe attending the event. Kyle Foster — wearing a Kansas City Chiefs jersey like Swift’s partner, Travis Kelce — said he had flown from North Carolina with his partner and two daughters for the show.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

  • in

    2 Teenagers Planned Attacks on Taylor Swift’s Vienna Concerts, Authorities Say

    A suspect confessed to a plot using explosives and other weapons to kill as many attendees as possible, security officials said. The singer’s three-concert Vienna run was canceled.Less than 24 hours after the arrest of two teenagers who the Austrian authorities say planned to attack a Taylor Swift concert in Vienna, security officials outlined a picture of an Islamic State-inspired assault designed to kill as many people as possible.Barracuda Music, the promoter for the singer’s three-concert Vienna run, canceled the gigs on Wednesday night. The events, which were scheduled to start Thursday, had been expected to draw more than 200,000 fans from across the world.The main suspect is a 19-year-old man who was radicalized online and swore an oath of allegiance to the Islamic State, Franz Ruf, the head of public safety in Austria, told a news conference on Thursday. Mr. Ruf said the suspect had confessed to the plans shortly after being arrested, giving the police a detailed insight into his intended acts, which included using explosives and weapons to kill as many concert attendees as possible.Searching the man’s home, where he lived with his parents, the police found explosives, timers, machetes and knives, Mr. Ruf said.A 17-year-old suspected of being an accomplice was known to the police and had recently started a job for a events service provider that was working at the Ernst Happel Stadium, where Ms. Swift was scheduled to play. He was arrested on Wednesday at the stadium, Mr. Ruf said.A 15-year-old boy who was also brought in for questioning confirmed many details of the main suspect’s confession, Mr. Ruf said, adding that the police believed that the boy was not an active participant in the plot, but knew of its details.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

  • in

    Taylor Swift’s Vienna Concerts Are Canceled After Terror Plot Arrests

    Three shows were called off after Austrian officials arrested two men and accused them of plotting a terrorist attack, and said that one had been focused on her upcoming stadium concerts.Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour has been canceled in Austria after officials announced the arrest of two men whom they accused of plotting a terrorist attack in Vienna, with one of them focusing on several stadium shows the singer had planned for this week.An Austrian concert promoter, Barracuda Music, announced the cancellation of the three shows in a post on Instagram. Nearly 200,000 people had been expected to attend the Vienna concerts, which were to start on Thursday.“We have no choice but to cancel the three scheduled shows for everyone’s safety,” the Instagram post said.Officials in Austria said at a news conference on Wednesday that two men had been arrested and accused of plotting a terrorist attack. One of them, a 19-year-old Austrian citizen, had recently pledged allegiance to the Islamic State online and had focused on the Eras Tour as a potential target, said Franz Ruf, an Austrian public security official.Law enforcement carried out a raid at the man’s home in Ternitz, a town south of Vienna, and found chemical substances, Mr. Ruf said, noting that officials sent a bomb squad to the home.The other man was arrested in Vienna.“Both suspects had become radicalized on the internet and had taken concrete preparatory actions for a terrorist attack,” said a news release from the Austrian interior department.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

  • in

    Russian Playwright and Theater Director Are Convicted of ‘Justifying Terrorism’

    A theater director and playwright were sentenced to prison, a stark indication of the increasing suppression of free speech since Russia’s attack on Ukraine, their lawyers and critics say.A Russian military court found a playwright and a theater director guilty of “justifying terrorism” on Monday, sentencing them to six years in prison each in a case that critics say is the latest chilling example of the crackdown on free speech since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022.The playwright, Svetlana Petriychuk, 44, and the director, Yevgenia Berkovich, 39, are both acclaimed members of the Russian theater world and have been in custody since May 2023. In addition to the six-year sentences, exactly the time frame requested by prosecutors, both women will be banned from “administering websites” for three years following their release.The play Ms. Petriychuk wrote and Ms. Berkovich staged, “Finist the Brave Falcon,” is an adaptation of a classic fairy tale of the same name, interwoven with the stories of women baited online by men into joining the Islamic State. It is loosely based on the true stories of thousands of women from across Russia and the former Soviet Union who were recruited by ISIS terrorists. The main character of the play returns to Russia feeling betrayed and disappointed by the man who lured her there, only to be sentenced to prison as a terrorist herself.The prosecutor, Ekaterina Denisova, insisted that Ms. Petriychuk holds “extremely aggressive Islamic ideologies” and formed a “positive opinion” of ISIS, according to the Russian outlet RBK, and that Ms. Berkovich holds “ideological convictions related to the justification and propaganda of terrorism.”Both women and their lawyers said they were innocent, repeatedly insisting during the trial that the play had an explicitly antiterror message.“I absolutely do not understand what this set of words has to do with me,” said Ms. Berkovich, when she pleaded not guilty. “I have never partaken in any forms of Islam: neither radical nor any other. I have respect for the religion of Islam, and I feel nothing but condemnation and disgust toward terrorists.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

  • in

    ‘Terraces’ Review: A Stunning Tragedy Revisits the Paris Terror Attacks

    The French writer Laurent Gaudé taps into collective trauma from the Nov. 13, 2015 terrorist outrage and channels it into something like catharsis.Outdoor cafe terraces are part and parcel of the Parisian way of life — ready meeting points for socializing and people-watching, across ages and social classes. Yet the word for them in French also means to floor, or bring down, someone.On Nov. 13, 2015, the worst Islamist terrorist attack in French history did just that to Parisians, bringing horror to cafes and entertainment venues in a string of coordinated shootings and bombings. Now Laurent Gaudé, a prominent French author and playwright, has channeled the collective trauma of that night into a stunning play, “Terraces,” which had its world premiere at the Théâtre National de la Colline in Paris on Wednesday.If you were in the city that night in 2015, fielding panicked calls from relatives and friends as news alerts pinged, the prospect of a show summoning those memories may be cause for trepidation. And “Terraces” does bring it all back — the gut punch, the nausea. Yet Gaudé and the director, Denis Marleau, manage just the right amount of distance and emotional finesse to haunt rather than reopen wounds.It isn’t the first attempt to dramatize the attack. In 2017, a book by Antoine Leiris, whose wife was among the victims, was adapted for the stage, and several short plays have focused on the stories of survivors.With “Terraces,” however, Gaudé works on a much more ambitious scale. Its structure is choral: The text weaves together not just the experience of victims, but the voices of people whose lives changed in other ways that night. Passers-by, spouses, parents, emergency medical workers, special forces and a janitor all make appearances, with stories that overlap and build up to a collective remembrance of the attack.Extensive research evidently went into the production, but “Terraces” doesn’t fit neatly into the genre of documentary theater. Its characters are composite creations rather than real people: Many introduce themselves under several names and stress that theirs are collective stories. While some characters pop up time and again over the course of the play, they often occupy a liminal space between dream and reality, reappearing at the scenes of other shootings or speaking from beyond the grave.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

  • in

    Piknik, a longtime Russian rock band, is now at the center of a tragedy.

    Early Saturday, Piknik, one of Russia’s most popular heritage rock bands, published a message to its page on Vkontakte, one of the country’s largest social media sites: “We are deeply shocked by this terrible tragedy and mourn with you.”The night before, the band was scheduled to play the first of two sold-out concerts, accompanied by a symphony orchestra, at Crocus City Hall in suburban Moscow. But before Piknik took the stage, four gunmen entered the vast venue, opened fire and murdered at least 133 people.The victims appear to have included some of Piknik’s own team. On Saturday evening, another note appeared on the band’s Vkontakte page to say that the woman who ran the band’s merchandise stalls was missing.“We are not ready to believe the worst,” the message said.The attack at Crocus City Hall has brought renewed attention to Piknik, a band that has provided the soundtrack to the lives of many Russian rock fans for over four decades.Ilya Kukulin, a cultural historian at Amherst College in Massachusetts, said in an interview that Piknik was one of the Soviet Union’s “monsters of rock,” with songs inspired by classic Western rock acts including David Bowie and a range of Russian styles.Since releasing its debut album, 1982’s “Smoke,” Piknik — led by Edmund Shklyarsky, the band’s singer and guitarist — has grown in popularity despite its music being often gloomy with gothic lyrics. Kukulin attributed this partly to the group’s inventive stage shows.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

  • in

    Will We Call Them Terrorists?

    “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” is a thriller rooted in a timely fear: We do not know how the future will see us.A group of young people sit around a dilapidated living room. They’re on couches, on chairs, on the floor. The lovers among them are nestled close. People are drinking from red Solo cups. Someone has a flask. A joint is circulating. There’s laughter and passionate debate and easy alternation between the two. With the sound turned off, the scene would be so familiar — just young adults, relaxing — that you would never guess the question they’re working through together: Are we terrorists? Do we feel like terrorists?“Of course I feel like a [expletive] terrorist!” one young man says, laughing. “We’re blowing up a goddamn pipeline!”No viewer will be surprised to hear this. It’s right there in the movie’s title: “How to Blow Up a Pipeline.” But the man himself seems shocked, as if he can’t quite believe what he’s saying. He and the film’s other main characters are hiding in an abandoned house in West Texas. They plan to strap homemade explosives to an oil pipeline the next day, hoping to reveal the industry’s fragility, encourage more ecosabotage and ultimately make fossil-fuel extraction untenable. “They’re going to call us revolutionaries,” one young woman suggests, waving the joint for effect. “Game changers.” Not so, another counters. “They’re going to call us terrorists. Because we’re doing terrorism.”The talk turns to history and the way tactics considered beyond the pale are often played down in retrospect. The Boston Tea Party — weren’t they terrorists, intentionally destroying key economic materials for political purposes? Martin Luther King Jr. was on an F.B.I. watch list; today he’s an American hero. Someone suggests that having the government call you a terrorist might mean you’re doing something right. Someone else suggests that when terrorism “works,” the forces of authority just lie and say change came entirely via “passive, nonviolent, kumbaya” actions. Someone argues that, hey, they’re not going to hurt anyone, to which someone else objects — sure they are; the plan is to create a spike in oil prices, which will have an immediate effect on the lives of poor people. “Revolution has collateral damage,” a handsome young man says with the timeless confidence of a handsome and slightly drunk young man with an audience.The scene is saturated with uncertainty, and nothing anyone says can make that uncertainty go away. The would-be saboteurs don’t even know for sure that their bombs will go off, let alone what effect they will have if they do. They don’t know if they will be caught. Above all, they cannot know how others, now or in the future, will view their actions. Will they be remembered — if they’re remembered at all — as brave warriors justified by the righteousness of their aims? As ordinary villains, sowing destruction and chaos to flatter their own radical impulses? Or as well-intentioned fools whose actions only made it harder, not easier, to achieve the changes they desired?The question is cranked up to 11 by the mass of explosives just yards away.The question of what the future will make of us — what distant generations, looking back, will think of our choices — has probably been invoked for as long as humans have debated what to do next. But the climate issue has made this question inescapable. Decisions we are making right now are determining not just how much hotter and more polluted the world gets, but also how prepared future generations will be to live in the hotter, more polluted world we leave them. This line of thinking feels, at first, galvanizing: What will our descendants, our literal and metaphorical children, wish we had done to make their lives better?The film “How to Blow Up a Pipeline,” directed by Daniel Goldhaber, was loosely adapted from a 2021 manifesto of the same name by the Swedish political theorist Andreas Malm. The book’s argument is simple: If the climate movement is serious about reducing fossil-fuel emissions at the necessary speed and scale, Malm contends, it will have to make room for strategies long dismissed as too extreme, including the illegal destruction of fossil-fuel infrastructure. Just a few years ago, this argument would only have appeared in organs of mainstream opinion so it could be condemned. Instead, the book received respectful coverage from outlets around the world. Now, surprisingly, it is a movie, one with prominent distribution and a cast featuring familiar faces from prestige TV.Two of its young protagonists, we learn, met when one saw the other browsing through Malm’s book in a store. Their group sees itself as converting Malm’s argument into action, and the fact that the film treats this perspective with sympathy — respect, even — makes it a strange kind of cultural landmark. Until now, ecologically minded saboteurs have generally been presented onscreen either as villains or, at best, as lost souls, unserious radicals who, in their impatience and naïveté, go too far. Goldhaber’s film does contain several critiques of its young protagonists’ scheme, but it remains open to — and, in some moments, palpably excited by — the possibility that they are right and that their plan will work exactly as they hope.But this is only a possibility. Thrillers work by planting questions and making us itch for answers. What makes “Pipeline” so interesting is the way it intertwines plot questions (will the explosives work?) with the uncertainty inherent in judging your actions by the standards of the future. Try as we might, we cannot always know the effects of our individual choices; we cannot know how they will relate to the actions of others or the currents of history; we cannot know how future generations will understand their world or through what lenses they will look back on ours. This uncertainty is the always-present shadow of every decision we make. It would be one thing to see a group of young adults drinking and debating Malm’s arguments in a dormitory; it is another to see them do it with bombs in a van outside. Like all of us, they are wondering what history will make of them, but the question is cranked up to 11 by the mass of explosives just yards away.The movie itself tries something similar; it seems to be going out of its way to feel as though it is already about a historical event. Structurally, it uses flashbacks to give each character a back story that sketches his or her motivations. Stylistically, Goldhaber makes frequent nods to the paranoid political thrillers of the 1970s. The effect is both electrifying and disorienting: This insistently contemporary story ends up feeling like something from the past, seen from the future, underlining the way the uncertainties faced by the saboteurs are the same ones faced by the film itself. What are the chances that, years from now, “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” might be seen as something like “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” a catalyst for historical change? What are the chances that its legacy might be widespread condemnation and draconian crackdowns on “terrorist” climate protests? What are the chances that it receives little notice at all and looks like just another example of our era talking about climate change but not halting it?“Pipeline” does not have those answers. By the final frame, we do know what has become of the saboteurs’ plan. In a traditional thriller, the resolution of the plot would be a cathartic release from uncertainty, but here we’re plunged back into all the questions the movie knows can’t be resolved. We cannot see the future until it arrives; it can go too many ways. This fact of life can be frightening. It’s nice to be reminded that it can also underline the moral stakes of our decisions in a way that gives them heft and energy.Source photographs: Neon; iStock/Getty Images More

  • in

    Sundance Liked Her Documentary, ‘Jihad Rehab,’ Until Muslim Critics Didn’t

    The film festival gave Meg Smaker’s “Jihad Rehab” a coveted spot in its 2022 lineup, but apologized after an outcry over her race and her approach.Meg Smaker felt exhilarated last November. After 16 months filming inside a Saudi rehabilitation center for accused terrorists, she learned that her documentary “Jihad Rehab” was invited to the 2022 Sundance Festival, one of the most prestigious showcases in the world.Her documentary centered on four former Guantánamo detainees sent to a rehab center in Saudi Arabia who had opened their lives to her, speaking of youthful attraction to Al Qaeda and the Taliban, of torture endured, and of regrets.Film critics warned that conservatives might bridle at these human portraits, but reviews after the festival’s screening were strong.“The absence of absolutes is what’s most enriching,” The Guardian stated, adding, “This is a movie for intelligent people looking to have their preconceived notions challenged.” Variety wrote: The film “feels like a miracle and an interrogative act of defiance.”But attacks would come from the left, not the right. Arab and Muslim filmmakers and their white supporters accused Ms. Smaker of Islamophobia and American propaganda. Some suggested her race was disqualifying, a white woman who presumed to tell the story of Arab men.Sundance leaders reversed themselves and apologized.Abigail Disney, a grandniece of Walt Disney, had been the executive director of “Jihad Rehab” and called it “freaking brilliant” in an email to Ms. Smaker. Now she disavowed it.The film “landed like a truckload of hate,” Ms. Disney wrote in an open letter.Ms. Smaker’s film has become near untouchable, unable to reach audiences. Prominent festivals rescinded invitations, and critics in the documentary world took to social media and pressured investors, advisers and even her friends to withdraw names from the credits. She is close to broke.“In my naïveté, I kept thinking people would get the anger out of their system and realize this film was not what they said,” Ms. Smaker said. “I’m trying to tell an authentic story that a lot of Americans might not have heard.”Battles over authorship and identity regularly roil the documentary world, a tightly knit and largely left-wing ecosystem.Ms. Smaker wanted to explore what leads men to embrace terrorism. But Arab American filmmakers say that framing was all too familiar. Meg SmakerMany Arab and Muslim filmmakers — who like others in the industry struggle for money and recognition — denounced “Jihad Rehab” as offering an all too familiar take. They say Ms. Smaker is the latest white documentarian to tell the story of Muslims through a lens of the war on terror. These documentary makers, they say, take their white, Western gaze and claim to film victims with empathy.Assia Boundaoui, a filmmaker, critiqued it for Documentary magazine.“To see my language and the homelands of folks in my community used as backdrops for white savior tendencies is nauseating,” she wrote. “The talk is all empathy, but the energy is Indiana Jones.”She called on festivals to allow Muslims to create “films that concern themselves not with war, but with life.”The argument over whether artists should share racial or ethnic identity and sympathy with their subjects is long running in literature and film — with many artists and writers, like the documentarians Ken Burns and Nanfu Wang, arguing it would be suffocating to tell the story of only their own culture and that the challenge is to inhabit worlds different from their own.In the case of “Jihad Rehab,” the identity critique is married to the view that the film must function as political art and examine the historic and cultural oppressions that led to the imprisonment of these men at Guantánamo.Some critics and documentary filmmakers say that mandate is reductive and numbing.“What I admired about ‘Jihad Rehab’ is that it allowed a viewer to make their own decisions,” said Chris Metzler, who helps select films for San Francisco Documentary Festival. “I was not watching a piece of propaganda.”Ms. Smaker has other defenders. Lorraine Ali, a television critic for The Los Angeles Times who is Muslim, wrote that the film was “a humanizing journey through a complex emotional process of self-reckoning and accountability, and a look at the devastating fallout of flawed U.S. and Saudi policy.”She is dismayed with Sundance.“In the independent film world there is a lot of weaponizing of identity politics,” Ms. Ali said in an interview. “The film took pains to understand the culture these men came from and molded them. It does a disservice to throw away a film that a lot of people should see.”From Firefighter to FilmmakerMs. Smaker was a 21-year-old firefighter in California when airplanes struck the World Trade Center on Sept. 11. She heard firefighters cry for vengeance and wondered: How did this happen?Looking for answers, she hitchhiked through Afghanistan and settled in the ancient city of Sana, Yemen, for half a decade, where she learned Arabic and taught firefighting. Then she obtained a master’s from Stanford University in filmmaking and turned to a place Yemeni friends had spoken of: the Mohammed bin Nayef Counseling and Care Center in Riyadh.The Saudi monarchy brooks little dissent. This center tries to rehabilitate accused terrorists and spans an unlikely distance between prison and boutique hotel. It has a gym and pool and teachers who offer art therapy and lectures on Islam, Freud and the true meanings of “jihad,” which include personal struggle.Hence the documentary’s original title, “Jihad Rehab,” which engendered much criticism, even from supporters, who saw it as too facile. “The film is very complex and the title is not,” said Ms. Ali, the Los Angeles Times critic.To address such concerns, the director recently renamed the film “The UnRedacted.”The United States sent 137 detainees from Guantánamo Bay to this center, which human rights groups cannot visit.But reporters with The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Atlantic and others have interviewed prisoners. Most stayed a few days.Ms. Smaker would remain more than a year exploring what leads men to embrace groups such as Al Qaeda and the Taliban.Saudi officials let her speak to 150 detainees, most of whom waved her off. She found four men who would talk.A film still of the guard tower. Ms. Smaker envisioned the documentary as opening with accusations facing the men — bomb maker, bin Laden driver, Taliban fighter — and peeling layers to find the human.Meg SmackerThese conversations form the core of the movie and cut far deeper than earlier news reports. That did not dissuade critics. Ms. Disney, a titan in the documentary world, picked up on a point raised by the film’s opponents. “A person cannot freely consent to anything in a carceral system, particularly one in a notoriously violent dictatorship,” she wrote.This is a debatable proposition. Journalists often interview prisoners, and documentaries like “The Thin Blue Line” give powerful voice to them, without necessarily clearing this purist hurdle of free consent.Ms. Disney declined an interview request, saying she wished Ms. Smaker well.Lawrence Wright wrote the Pulitzer Prize-winning book “The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11” and spent much time in Saudi Arabia. He saw the documentary.“As a reporter, you acknowledge the constraints on prisoners, and Smaker could have acknowledged it with more emphasis,” he said. “But she was exploring a great mystery — understanding those who may have done something appalling — and this does not discredit that effort.”To gain intimate access, he added, was a coup.Ms. Smaker envisioned the film as an unfolding, opening with American accusations — bomb maker, bin Laden driver, Taliban fighter — and peeling layers to find the human.Distrust yielded to trust. Men described being drawn to Al Qaeda out of boredom, poverty and defense of Islam. What emerged was a portrait of men on the cusp of middle-age reckoning with their past.Ms. Smaker asked one of the men, “Are you a terrorist?”He bridled. “Someone fight me, I fight them. Why do you call me terrorist?”Her critics argue that such questions registered as accusation. “These questions seek to humanize the men, but they still frame them as terrorists,” Pat Mullen, a Toronto film critic, wrote in Point of View magazine.Mr. Metzler of the San Francisco festival said a documentarian must ask questions that are on a viewer’s mind.The film in fact dwells on torture inflicted by Americans at Guantánamo Bay. Ali al-Raimi arrived at age 16. “Every day was worse than the last day,” he said.He tried to hang himself.“Nothing,” he said, “was worse than Guantánamo.”The men longed for the prosaic: marriage, children, a job. Khalid, a voluble man, was trained as a bomb maker; in the film, he said he now crafts remote-control car alarms in Jeddah. Ambiguity lingers.Success, InterruptedSundance announced in December that it had selected “Jihad Rehab” for its 2022 festival, held the following month. Critics erupted.“An entirely white team behind a film about Yemeni and South Arabian men,” the filmmaker Violeta Ayala wrote in a tweet.Ms. Smaker’s film had a Yemeni-American executive producer and a Saudi co-producer.More than 230 filmmakers signed a letter denouncing the documentary. A majority had not seen it. The letter noted that over 20 years, Sundance had programmed 76 films about Muslims and the Middle East, but only 35 percent of them had been directed by Muslim or Arab filmmakers.Sundance noted that in its 2022 festival, of the 152 films in which directors revealed their ethnicity, 7 percent were Middle Eastern. Estimates place Americans of Arab descent at between 1.5 and 3 percent.Sundance officials backtracked. Tabitha Jackson, then the director of the festival, demanded to see consent forms from the detainees and Ms. Smaker’s plan to protect them once the film debuted, according to an email shown to The Times. Ms. Jackson also required an ethics review of the plans and gave Ms. Smaker four days to comply. Efforts to reach Ms. Jackson were unsuccessful.The review concluded Ms. Smaker more than met standards of safety.Ms. Smaker said a public relations firm recommended that she apologize. “What was I apologizing for?” she said. “For trusting my audience to make up their own mind?”Prominent documentary executives said Sundance’s demands were without precedent.An executive who has run a major festival went so far as to write an email to Sundance cautioning that its demands of Ms. Smaker might embolden protesters. Festivals, the executive wrote, will ask “two, three, four times what are the headwinds” before extending an invitation.That executive had earlier invited Ms. Smaker to show “Jihad Rehab,” but she had declined as her film was not yet completed. This executive asked to remain anonymous out of concern of offending Muslim filmmakers.“Jihad Rehab” premiered in January; most major reviews were good. But Ms. Smaker’s critics were not persuaded.“When I, a practicing Muslim woman, say that this film is problematic,” wrote Jude Chehab, a Lebanese American documentarian, “my voice should be stronger than a white woman saying that it isn’t. Point blank.”Ms. Disney, the former champion, wrote, “I failed, failed and absolutely failed to understand just how exhausted by and disgusted with the perpetual representation of Muslim men and women as terrorists or former terrorists or potential terrorists the Muslim people are.”Her apology and that of Sundance shook the industry. The South by Southwest and San Francisco festivals rescinded invitations.Jihad Turk, former imam of Los Angeles’s largest mosque, was baffled. In December, his friend Tim Disney — brother of Abigail — invited him to a screening.“My first instinct,” he said, “was ‘Oh, not another film on jihad and Islam.’ Then I watched and it was introspective and intelligent. My hope is that there is a courageous outlet that is not intimidated by activists and their too narrow views.”An Elusive Happy EndingIn June, Ms. Smaker received another screening — at the Doc Edge festival in New Zealand.She hopped a flight to Auckland with trepidation. Would this end in cancellation? Word had leaked out, and Mr. Mullen, the Toronto film critic, tweeted a warning.“Oh wild — controversial Sundance doc Jihad Rehab comes out of hiding,” he wrote, adding: “Why would anyone program this film after Sundance? File under ‘we warned you!’”Dan Shanan, who heads the New Zealand festival, shrugged.“What happened at Sundance was not good,” he said. “Film festivals must hold to their belief in their role.”Ms. Smaker has maxed out credit cards and, at age 42, borrowed money from her parents. This is not the Sundance debut of her dreams. “I don’t have the money or influence to fight this out,” she said, running hands back through her hair. “I’m not sure I see a way out.” More