What inspires the Osama’s of this world? 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 two Polish filmmakers Marcin Mamon and Mariusz Pilis travel around theworld for more than ten years now.
On their long journey they met with warlords, clan-leaders, emirs and mullahs, 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 ends in Waziristan, along the Afghan-Pakistan border, in the Summer of 2004. The film maps out the ideas of the “fundamentalist international”, ideas that put to the test our Western democratic beliefs about society.

Central in the story are Zelimkhan Yandarbiev (picture on the left), former president of Chechnya, and the reconstruction of his meeting with Taliban leader Mullah Omar in 2000 in Kandahar, Afghanistan. The two met as Yandarbiev intended to establish an alliance that would enable the Chechens to form an army of mujahedeen, to train them in Afghan camps and to attack the Russians, who invaded their country once again in 1999, in the back.
Until his violent death on February the 13th in 2004, Yandarbiev, operating from his place of exile in Qatar and using internet and mobile phones, was an important hub in the network of the International Jihad. Two weeks before he was murdered by Russian agents, Mamon and Pilis filmed him for five days in Qatar. During a long interview, his last one, he very openly and willingly shared his insights into what moves him and his fellow fighters.

Other characters in the film are the Chechen terrorist Shamil Basaev; the ‘godfather’ of the Chechen Mafia Hozh-Ahmed Noukhaev (on the right); Chechen warlord and spiritual leader Hamzat Gilaev; the Jordanian emir Al Chattab, who fought for twenty years in Afghanistan, Bosnia and the Caucasus; and the Afghan Ishmael Khan, the emir al Mumminin –leader of all believers – who has his strongpoint in Herat, on the border between Afghanistan and Iran.
The main character of the film however may well be Dar al-Islam, the world of the believers that is everywhere where the law of Allah is observed in its entirety.

The Smell of Paradise was shot in Chechnya, Dagestan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Qatar and Afghanistan, in places that have become white spaces on the map of Western journalism. The film takes the viewer not only into a different world, but also to another time. The result is a unique glance into the universe of the jihad, the mental and physical battle that drives the “fundamentalist international”.



Background

Since 9/11 our Western perception of the Islam has been subject to rapid and nervous change. Not only are we more interested than before, also the differences are measured out more broadly. Once again in history the values and ideas of the world of the Islam are seen by many as a threat to our way of living. Sometimes it almost looks like the times of the crusades and the Turkish Siege of Vienna are reviving. The war of ideology, the battle between the driving ideas behind the open Western democracies on one side and the words of the holy book of the Islam on the other, is seen by many as the conflict of the 21st century.

The Islamic revival has taken many forms, from Hezbollah in the Lebanon to Bhumiputra in Malaysia. Most of it is a peaceful and genuine search for a new balance between religion and secularization, between local traditions and the ongoing march of globalization.
Without a doubt most Muslims living in the West are not having difficulties with the modalities of our society. But there are also those who are perceptible to other, more radical sentiments.
Radical Islamists, or “fundamentalists”, offer the rest of us no compromise but a simple choice instead: Islam or jahiliyya, believe in Allah or remain ignorant. Either we observe the law of Allah in its entirety, or we apply the laws laid down by men. The jihad of the fundamentalists has become an uncompromising battle against Dar al-Harb, the world in which one is not living according to the Koran.
This fundamentalist movement does not take any traditional or geographical borders into account, one of the reasons why Zine Abidine Ben Ali, president of Tunisia, once named it “the fundamentalist international”.

The Smell of Paradise is a unique project. After the documentary The Mountain it is the next step in an ongoing collaboration between polish filmmakers Mariusz Pilis and Marcin Mamon, and George Brugmans, who produced various films dealing with similar issues for Dutch broadcaster VPRO Television.
The 90” film is a production of Phanta Vision Film International, Amago and Polish IST Films, made in co-production with VPRO NL, TVP Poland, BNT Bulgaria and TV2 Denmark. This version premiered at IDFA 2004.
A second, 70" version, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival of 2005. An even shorter version -59"- was made in co-production with the BBC and aired as part of Storyville on BBC4, in January, 2006.

Directors - Mariusz Pilis and Marcin Mamon
Directors of Photography - Tomasz Glowacki, Jacek Januszyk, Andrzej Jaskowski
Editors - Jaroslaw Kaminski, JP Luysterburg
Composer - Michel Lorenc

Produced by George Brugmans, Petra Goedings and Mariusz Pilis

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Distributed by Films Transit International

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