ALSO KNOWN AS JIHADI

Pulling from real events and court documents in the wake of the 2015 Paris terror attacks, Also Known As Jihadi follows a young man's journey to radicalism not through his actions, but through his surroundings. A haunting exploration of how our environments can lay a foundation for the unthinkable, filmmaker Eric Baudelaire constructs a portrait of a man without ever showing him on screen. Instead, Baudelaire takes a thought-provoking cinematographic approach and traces the man's route from France to Syria, alternating between the landscapes his subject traveled through and the judicial reports from his eventual arrest. In a effort to document the man's journey through his own eyes, Also Known As Jihadi recreates a path that is incomprehensible to many, making it all the more compelling as it allows the audience to dwell on the implications of the images it presents.

Baudelaire expands upon the "landscape theory" proposed by Japanese filmmaker Masao Adachi, who posited landscape as expression of political power structures in his 1969 film AKA Serial Killer. In Baudelaire's own meditation on urban landscapes, his vivid photography contextualizes actions that many fail to understand in a study of how individuals are ultimately shaped by their environment.