How do survivors of Quebec mosque shooting find hope?
MONTREAL – Before leaving for evening prayers at the mosque, Azzedine Soufiane asked his wife to prepare couscous for supper. “It was his favourite dish,” said Najat Naanaa.
But Soufiane would never return home, never again share a meal with his wife or children. On Jan. 29, 2017, he was one of six men gunned down after evening prayers at the Islamic Cultural Centre in the Quebec City suburb of Sainte-Foy.
“He always had a smile. He was a good man,” says Soufiane’s widow in The Mosque: A Community’s Struggle, Montreal filmmaker Ariel Nasr’s powerful documentary. “I still cannot believe that my husband has died, and in this manner.”
Soufiane died trying to stop the armed man who had entered the mosque: a hero’s death, many have called it. The men were sitting around talking after prayers when the bullets came flying through the room, as survivor Mohamed Hafid recalls in the film. “Come, come, we’ll attack him,” he remembers Soufiane saying.
“Then the terrorist came back, with his gun reloaded.
And that’s when Azzedine tried to stop him. That’s when he killed him, with a bullet to the head. I can still see it so clearly.”
The story of the mass shooting is well known, but as a documentary filmmaker, “I really felt called to do something that would help to put the voices of the people who were victims of the attack into the media,” Nasr, 41, said in an interview this week.
An award-winning writer, director and producer, he was nominated for an Oscar in
2013 for producing the drama Buzkashi Boys, shot on location in Afghanistan. Working for four years as a filmmaker in Kabul, he witnessed several terrorist attacks.
“When I came back, I didn’t think I would see this again,” he said. But on hearing about the mosque shootings, “it was immediately clear to me that a terrorist attack had happened.”
Nasr approached the community through a mutual friend and, “rather than come to them with a creative proposal, I kind of said to them, ‘What do you think?’ And it became a kind of collaboration.
“In terms of content, I wanted to focus on what the community is doing now to survive and to find hope. … We wanted to focus not their victimhood but on their resilience. That’s what I went in with and, as things went forward, that really was the right approach.”
The Mosque: A Community’s Struggle, a Loaded Pictures production, aired in 2019 in English on the CBC and in French — La Mosquée: Une communauté menacée — on Canal 2. On Jan. 29, the third anniversary of the mosque attack, the French version will have its theatre première in Cineplex theatres across Quebec and be followed by panel discussions.