By: Petra Chase, Arts & Culture Editor
Content warning: mentions of Islamophobia, colonialism, and racism.
Canada’s façade of tolerance and freedom is stripped away in a new documentary called Manufacturing the Threat. It’s the first feature-length documentary that explores the infiltration of marginalized communities by agent provocateurs, revealing the dark underbelly of the Canadian Security Intelligence Services (CSIS). It premiered on May 6 as part of DOXA Documentary Film Festival screenings, and it’s a must-see for understanding how colonial power is upheld in Canada.
The film’s director, Amy Miller, has been making documentaries “in the spirit of justice” since 2008, and her documentaries have been screened at over 100 festivals around the world. Inspired by educational theorist Paulo Freire, Miller believes in “popular education as a way for transformative change,” she told The Peak. “[Freire] came up with this idea that if you can connect the dots for people in terms of structural inequalities in our life, they can build collective power and transform society.”
The documentary investigates the case of Ana Korody and Omar Nuttall, a couple from Surrey who were targeted by CSIS agents after converting to Islam. They spoke on how their vulnerable mental states and life circumstances were taken advantage of in radicalizing and coercing them to plot a bomb on Canada Day. They were told that according to Islam, they were predestined to commit this act and had no free will, which Ana explained and later learned is not accurate according to Muslim teachings. They were arrested in 2013, and in 2022 sued the RCMP. Hearing about their experiences, which must have taken a lot of bravery to share, was chilling.
“We often hear the claim that the way to counter racism in national security agencies is to diversify them,” Azeezah Kanji, a legal academic with a specialty in Islamic law stated in the documentary. “To the contrary, the presence of Muslim officers is used to further extend the arm of securitization and the reach of these agencies into vulnerable Muslim communities and families.”
Manufacturing the Threat points out how the CSIS exists to “justify its own existence.” The film demonstrates Canada’s largely undocumented history of infiltrating and undermining marginalized communities to uphold colonial control, which was inspired by the book Produire La Menace by Alex Popovic. From the RCMP’s roots in colonizing Indigenous land to vilifying and surveilling Muslims in the aftermath of 9/11, Miller hopes the film shows people how “othering happens in a collective way through things like policing.”
Miller explained information on the CSIS’ operations are not widely known or available. “It is so difficult to be able to have the proper conversations that we’re just navigating in the fog,” she said. “Something we really should be discussing more is: why is it so difficult to get this information, why does Canada like to present itself as this beacon of democracy, and why is our access to information so difficult and filled with so many trickwires to stop us from having that access?”
Miller argues that security threats like climate change are largely ignored, and other “manufactured” threats are used as distractions. “To me, it’s not homeless people in Vancouver that’s the crisis around what makes people feel safe, it’s affordable housing,” she added. “I think we need to go a step backwards and say ‘what does national security even mean in 2023?’” In our current institution, it’s often those who defy the “status quo” who are made into an enemy.
Check out the full list of documentaries showing this year at DOXA on their website, doxa2023.eventive.org/films. Find out more about Amy Miller, her campaigns, and documentaries on her website, amymiller.info.
