Stranger At The Gate

One of the dangers of fascism is that it has a naturally appealing story. Fear and disgust are powerful emotions; responding to them with aggression easily creates the delusion of power. The proliferation of such stories makes it much easier for cultural narratives to shift and real changes to occur in the world. After a while, though, too much of any kind of story gets dull. Every now and again, something comes along which goes against the grain – a different kind of story, opening up different kinds of possibilities, compelling not because it commands the same emotions but because it’s so unusual.

When she tells them her father’s story, says Richard ‘Mac’ McKinney’s daughter, people think she’s making it up. Had things been just a little bit different, she might have featured in a very different kind of film, her face in shadow, repeating lines about how quiet and harmless he seemed, how nobody ever suspected anything. As it happens, she really didn’t suspect anything, but she did know, like her mother, that he had come back damaged from war. The thing is, so did around three quarters of those who served.

In interview, Mac recalls the process of transformation – the strangeness of the place, the awful things he saw, the way he learned first to distrust and then to hate Muslims, to see them as the enemy. He recalls the shock, after going home, of seeing a woman in a hijab at his daughter’s school. The only way this made sense to him, traumatised as he was, was that she and other Muslims in the US must be terrorists just waiting for an opportunity to act. He feared for his family’s safety, and felt that the only think he could do was to pre-empt an attack with violence of his own. With that in mind, he began sizing up the local Islamic centre and mosque. But to make it clear to other people that his actions were justified, he reasoned, he would have to do some research first. The way that the Muslim community reacted to this changed everything.

With contributions from all the major participants in its extraordinary story, Joshua Seftel’s short documentary is a powerful piece of work. It has qualified for Oscar consideration and is about to be streamed by the New Yorker, making it free to watch worldwide. Quiet and unassuming, it digs down into the processes of change which Mac experienced whilst also looking outward at wider society and what actions might be taken to help change other people’s stories. Key to this is recognition of the capacity for change, something easily lost as a result of personal or societal trauma.

There is reflection here on the teachings of Islam (Seftel himself is Jewish but has worked closely with Muslim communities for some years), but there is also a more general look at the importance of community, with one woman noting that Mac was part of a unit when serving in the military and naturally found it hard to cope on his own, or with only his family for support, when that unit was disbanded. A twist halfway through looks at how the mosque attendees responded when confronted with the truth about what Mac had been planning, and illustrates that a strong community can take a different approach to dealing with fear.

Told in a style which avoids sensationalism and lets events speak for themselves, Stranger At The Gate is a quietly revolutionary film. It's a celebration of diversity both within our communities and within the stories which we tell.