Balsillie School of International Affairs

Migration Storytelling: The UnRedacted
2023-11-08 19:00 - 21:30 (America/Toronto) | CIGI Auditorium, 67 Erb Street West, Waterloo, ON, N2L 6C2, Canada
Join the BSIA and Wilfrid Laurier’s Department of English and Film Studies on Wednesday, November 8th at 7:00 pm EST for the next event in our Migration Storytelling Series.
The UnRedacted is a film about a group of men trained by al-Qaeda who, after being captured, and following a sentence in Guantanamo, are transferred to the world’s first rehabilitation center for “terrorists,” located in Saudi Arabia. Filmed over three years, with unprecedented access, this film is a complex and nuanced exploration of the inner lives of the men we have heard so much about but never heard from.
A conversation with the filmmaker will follow the screening.
Watch the trailer: https://youtu.be/PrkSKCSXYh8
About the filmmaker
Before becoming a filmmaker, Meg Smaker served as a firefighter for over a half decade. She spent almost 10 years living and working in the Middle East, five of them in Yemen, where she learned Arabic and studied Islamic culture while teaching firefighting to Yemeni men.
As a filmmaker, Meg likes to explore controversial subjects from unorthodox viewpoints. Her films have won numerous awards, including Best Short Documentary at SXSW (South By Southwest) and a Student Academy Award. Her film, Boxeadora, received critical acclaim as “one of the best boxing films of all time” by Paste Magazine. Meg was also featured in the Hollywood Reporter’s “Next Gen” issue as one of the film industries most promising new nonfiction filmmakers, and just this year Filmmaker Magazine named her one of the “25 New Faces of Independent Film”. Meg’s most recent film, The UnRedacted (Jihad Rehab)-her début feature length documentary, premiered at this year’s Sundance to rave reviews from film critics. Meg received an MFA in Documentary Film from Stanford University, Graduate Certificate from Stanford Graduate School of Business, and a BA with honors in Political, Legal, and Economic Analysis (PLEA) from Mills College.
