Director exorcises the ‘Ghosts of Sugar Land’
For his first film, Bassam Tariq flew to his native Pakistan to codirect “These Birds Walk,” an award-winning 2013 documentary about runaway kids in Karachi and an ambulance driver who helps them. But for his latest project, Tariq, who grew up in New York before moving to Houston as an elementary school student, stayed much closer to home.
With the 21-minute documentary short “Ghosts of Sugar Land,” which just landed on Netflix, the filmmaker, who turns 33 Tuesday, wanted to untangle the sundered bonds of friendship following news that one of his running buddies from his teen years in Fort Bend County, Warren Christopher Clark, had disappeared and moved to Syria to join ISIS. The film is less about Clark, who was captured in January by U.S.-backed Syrian Armed Forces and now sits in a federal prison in Texas awaiting trial, and more about the effect his decision had on his friends, all young Muslim Americans burdened by
the weight of stereotypes and assumptions in post-9/11 America.
Tariq didn’t go to high school with Clark — the director went to Kempner, Clark to Clements — but they ran in the same circles.
“A lot of us who grew up in Sugar Land connected through the mosque and knew each other through events,” recalls Tariq, who moved to Texas when he was about 10, in a phone interview from London. “He was good friends with my brother, so he would always be over to my house. My brother did game nights, and we’d all play video games. That’s how I knew him. He was in my house every day.”
But something was different about Clark, Tariq says. There was the obvious fact that he was the only African-American in a circle of South Asian Muslim friends.
“We (South Asians) stick out, particularly when you have one friend in the group who sticks out more than them. And they all kind of picked on him,” Tariq says.
Even beyond matters of race and religion, Clark had trouble fitting in. Tariq suspects he felt alone, even in a crowd.
“There’s the black nerd movement and stuff like that. But this was the very early days of that,” Tariq says. “He was definitely what people would call a ‘blerd.’ (He was) really into anime.
“The incredible thing about Houston is how diverse it is … but, in that neighborhood, there weren’t that many black kids there. He had mentioned that a few times.”
Spy or true believer?
Tariq thought Clark — who converted to Islam in 2004, graduated from University of Houston, worked as a substitute teacher in Texas and taught English in Saudi Arabia — was slipping ever deeper down an extremist wormhole.
“He was isolating himself more and more from others with views that are not in the consensus of Islam,” Tariq says. “I think he was very much out of the fold of Islam (with ideas) that were held by a really small, vocal minority online.”
Then the incendiary posts started. They were so extreme that some of his old circle thought he must be a spy.
“It was so crazy,” Tariq remembers. “There were a lot of stories of him trying to get people to do things or say things. It was hard to take seriously. He was just a troll.
“My brother once wrote online ‘happy anniversary’ to me and my wife. He wrote, ‘Ah, you shouldn’t be celebrating anniversaries.’ Dude, why are you going to fight over this? It just felt so ridiculous. It was like he was baiting us.”
Some unfriended him. Everyone thought he might bring unwanted attention from law enforcement.
“I think the FBI did reach out to many of his friends,” Tariq says. “I think they definitely knew about it. I think they thought he was just a knucklehead, I guess.”
Tariq, who had graduated from University of Texas at Austin
with a degree in advertising, thought all of this would make for an intriguing documentary.
“I’d always been quite interested in Warren’s story because, even as a friend, he was really confused, and he was trying to reach out to us,” Tariq says. “I think we didn’t know — I didn’t know — how to talk about it, and nobody actually wanted to talk about it. Everyone was quite scared.
“He had gone missing for a few years at that point, and there were a lot of rumors about what happened,” he says. “But then he would appear online. It was all a bit confusing. Did he go? Did he not go?”
Behind the mask
Once Tariq decided to make the movie, his friends didn’t want to participate. So they came up with a compromise: They’d talk if they could wear masks. And so we see them, in bedrooms and living rooms, behind the fa çades of Optimus Prime and Spider-Man, recollecting stories about their onetime friend and what it means to be a young Muslim in America today. It adds a jolt of whimsy and surrealism to a situation that is all too real.
“One friend said, ‘Yeah, if I can wear a Spider-Man mask, maybe I’ll do it,’ ” Tariq remembers. “That was a way for us to come into it. It was quite a difficult subject for us to talk about. As immigrants, we want to keep our heads down. We don’t want to get into trouble. We don’t want to ruffle any feathers, particularly after 9/11. We’ve been told to keep chill, keep your head down. When people do something crazy, don’t try to understand them.”
They provided Clark a mask of sorts as well. His real name is not used in “Ghosts of Sugar Land.” They identify him as “Mark.”
Beyond the hidden identities, there was also guilt that they could have done more to help
Clark.
“That’s something we’ve all been now trying to understand is how complicit are we in how our friends think, and what could have been done differently,” he says. “That’s a lot of pressure to put on 16- and 17-year-olds who just want to fit in. Particularly as a young Muslim, you just want to fit in. You already look different.”
Notably, Tariq doesn’t talk to Clark’s family or law enforcement in “Ghosts of Sugar Land,” though he says he did try to reach out to his sister.
“I wanted it to be a film about friendship,” he says. “I wanted to make a very specific film that was a portrait of Muslim America. It’s not a whodunit about Warren. Warren is an important part of the story, but this is a story about my friends trying to understand what happened to our friend.”
Of course, that was prior to Clark being found and arrested, shortly before the film was due to premiere at Sundance, where it won the Short Film Jury Award for Nonfiction and got snapped up by Netflix.
“With the story being what it is now, now that Warren is in the world and alive and in Texas, it changes things,” notes Tariq, who says he would like to make a longer version of the film at some point. “My hope is to get Warren to speak now that we know where he is. I see that as my duty as a friend to him … I really want to hear him out. …
All I have in the film from him are his messages to me … I had to build who he is from that.”
Blossoming career
Tariq won’t be getting around to a 2.0 version of “Sugar Land” just yet. He’s in the editing stages on his first, full-length dramatic feature, “Mughal Mowgli,” starring Riz Ahmed (“Nightcrawler,” “The Night Of ”) as a British Pakistani rapper.
He’s also not just in the movie business. As a New York resident for the past few years — though he has temporarily relocated back to Sugar Land for family reasons — Tariq was not impressed with the selection of halal butchers in the Big Apple, so he co-founded a butcher shop called Honest Chops.
The through line in all his projects is expressing how Muslims live now.
“It’s really easy to get worried about being pigeonholed. But pigeonholing is something that someone does to you, you don’t do it to yourself. So I’m not going to worry about it,” he says. “I’m going to do what I feel compelled to do. The stories I want to tell are very universal stories but told through a specific lens. Generally, people of color get asked that question. ‘Why don’t you tell a story about blah blah blah?’ I’m going to tell what I know.”
But if and when he does expand “Sugar Land,” and he gets to talk to Clark, what would he say to him?
“I asked the guys that question, but I never asked myself that question,” Tariq says after a pause. “To be honest, I would want to give him a hug. I want to just embrace him and be there. I want him to know, it’s not easy, whatever it is he’s going through.”