THE SMELL OF PARADISE

The Fundamentalist International

Movies : Documentary
DVD Rip : English

A film by MARIUSZ PILIS and MARCIN MAMON
Co-production with VPRO NL, TVP POLAND, BNT BULGARIA and TV2 DENMARK
IDFA 2004

| POLAND/THE NETHERLANDS | 2005 | 91 minutes |

What inspires the Osama's of this world? A unique glance into the land of the jihad, the mental and physical battle that drives the “fundamentalist international”.

What drives people to fight against our Western world with the Koran in one hand and a rifle in the other, with Truth as their only argument? What drives people who are prepared to sacrifice their life utterly convinced that this is the only way to save or create the world as they want it to be?

What is so irresistible about THE SMELL OF PARADISE?

These are the urgent questions with which the filmmakers traveled around the world for more than ten years now. On their long journey they have met with warlords, clan-leaders, emirs and mullahs, with terrorists and godfathers, but foremost with many common believers of Dar al-Islam, the abode of Islam.

THE SMELL OF PARADISE is a road movie, a personal adventure, not without personal risk, that starts in Chechnya in 1995, and takes us places that have become white spaces on the world map of Western journalists.

Via Dagestan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Qatar and Afghanistan it ends in Waziristan, along the Afghan-Pakistan border. We are lead through this story by the filmmakers Mariusz Pilis and Marcin Mamon, who make us relate to this unknown world as they translate the ideas of the “fundamentalist international”, ideas that put our Western democratic beliefs about society to the test.