A house in Kirkland, safe schools for his children in the Lake Washington School District, a better future – it was Sam Malkandi’s slice of the American dream.
Malkandi entered the U.S. as an Iraq refugee with his wife, son and daughter in 1998 and eventually moved into the Juanita neighborhood.
But after the government linked the Kirkland man to an Al Qaeda terrorist and deemed him a national security risk, Malkandi was detained for five years at the Federal Detention Center in SeaTac in 2005. He was ultimately deported back to Iraq in May 2010 – leaving behind his wife and children.
Seattle filmmakers and journalists Alex Stonehill and Sarah Stuteville heard about the story and decided to investigate further into the case last November.
But what they found was much deeper than the plight of one man.
“The most surprising thing that’s come out of this for me is understanding the tension that there is between an individual person’s rights and liberties – especially when that person is an immigrant – and our collective desire for national security,” said Stonehill. “I think that I hadn’t really seen how at odds those things can be until I started investigating the story.”
The couple, who are married, traveled to Sulaymaniyah, Iraq for two weeks and conducted a series of interviews with Malkandi.
“Initially, it was a little scary because obviously this was a guy who’s been charged with being a travel facilitator for Al Qaeda,” said Stonehill. “So during the first meeting we were nervous about how this guy was going to be and within 10 minutes of meeting him that was all pretty much gone because he’s such a friendly person and very personable and gentle. He has an accent and is from another country, but he’s very American in his taste and in his mannerisms and ideas.”
Stonehill and Stuteville also spoke with Malkandi’s wife, Mali, her son, Arvin and daughter, Nicole at their Kirkland home. They spoke with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, with Malkandi’s friends and neighbors and poured through court documents.
“We started to realize, wow this is a very compelling story and it’s really hard to figure out whether these accusations are valid or not,” said Stonehill, who also teaches digital storytelling at the University of Washington, along with Stuteville. “So what we thought was going to be a pretty small project, we realized there was a lot of potential to do more with it.”
Upon returning to Seattle, Stuteville and Stonehill, co-founders of the multimedia journalism nonprofit the Common Language Project, joined forces with the Last Quest, a local production company, to turn their reporting into a feature-length documentary, “Barzan.”
The film explores the controversial issues of immigration, xenophobia and the price of security in the 21st century.
Barzan was Malkandi’s childhood nickname that connected him to a suspected terrorist, Tawfiq bin Attash. Malkandi attempted to fraudulently obtain a U.S. visa for Bin Attash to travel to the U.S. and receive medical treatment.
Bin Attash was a former bodyguard of Osama bin Laden and is suspected of planning the 1998 U.S. Embassy bombings in Africa and the attack on the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000. However, Malkandi, now 53, said he was just trying to help a friend of a friend.
Stonehill says he hopes the film will provoke people to think about “our own desires to feel safe and what the costs of that are and I hope it’ll provoke thought about whether that’s worth it.”
His team now needs post-production funds to complete their film, and has turned to Kickstarter.com to help raise $8,400 by March 2. Kickstarter projects must reach their fund-raising goals or lose all pledges.
To learn more about the film or to help fund the project, please visit: www.kickstarter.com/projects/cassidyd/barzan-the-movie.
