Directed by Parvez Sharma. (STC) 81 min. Opens July 18 at The Royal, 608 College.
A fascinating topic gets a perfunctory treatment in A Jihad for Love, which doesn’t so much probe the difficulties faced by gay and lesbian Muslims living outside North America as inventory them. This documentary, produced by Sandi Dubowski (Trembling Before G-d) is laden with incident and light on insight. Surely, the plight of a man like Mushin Hendricks — an affable imam whose attempts to finesse a reading of the Koran that destigmatizes homosexuality are met with death threats — is compelling. But director Parvez Sharma (himself a gay Muslim) never asks Hendricks, who married and fathered three children in an attempt to deny his sexuality, why he so loves a religion bent on hating him.
Sharma’s hesitance to prod his subjects (who also include a quartet of Iranian men angling for refugee status in Canada and a Parisian lesbian couple) on the precise nature of their faith — or to provide much in the way of counterpoint opinion — dulls the film’s edge. His insistence on telling so many similar stories at once, meanwhile, makes A Jihad For Love feel redundant in spite of its unprecedented subject matter. Sharma’s film is well-intentioned and technically sound, but, compared to a film like Tanaz Eshaghian’s Be Like Others, which examines the contradictions of Iran’s sex-change industry, it’s also rather thin.