(2022, Italy, 90')
Who is Tooba Gondal, a French-British jihadist known in the press as the ISIS matchmaker? It seems almost insane to think about love relationships when brutal violence of Islamist extremists is part of the equation, and yet, Gondal’s duty, recruited among jihadists at twenty, is to find them wives. These wives will be picked in the West, where Gondal lives. In this interesting documentary, Argentieri retraces the girl’s life choices and what pushed her to abandon her studies and step into a radical, execrable world. Where is she today? What does it mean, for her, to live a life of precariousness and exclusion?
An independent journalist whose work has been published on Italian major newspaper Corriere della Sera and on international outlets such as Reuters, The Sunday Times, the Daily Beast, and the Sunday Telegraph, Benedetta Argentieri is interested in the living conditions of women and in ongoing conflicts in the Middle East (Iraq and Syria). She treated these themes in his latest book Io non sono Islam (2019) (lit. ‘I am not Islam’) and in several documentary films which she co-produced and co-directed. Our War (2016) passed out of competition at the 73rd VFF. In 2018, she entered I Am the Revolution at the DOC NYC programme.
