I think the really pressing issue of our time is the Middle-East War and I have yet to see a great film/documentary on the middle-eastern conflict so far. There have been good films on 9/11 and the war against terror (as seen from the American/western perspective) and there have been good documentaries on the tragic loss of life in countries such as Syria and Iraq (as seen from Middle-Eastern film-makers). In fact one of the greatest films of the past decade whose brilliance went unrecognised by both critics and audiences was Iraq in Fragments (2007) by director James Longley that brilliantly exposed the buried religious tensions that've plagued all middle-eastern countries in the post Ottoman era.
But my point is none of these go in-depth into origins of the middle-eastern war. To honestly understand this conflict, it is important to study the primitive years of Islamic age in the post-Muhammad era. Now the conception of the middle-eastern war doesn't coincide with the birth of Islam but rather the division of muslim population in the Arabian peninsula into the Shia and Sunni (and Kurds) groups following the death of the Prophet Muhammad. The modern extremist sunni movement has its origins in the beginning of the 19th century when the muslim scolar Muhammad ibn ʿAbd al-Wahhab out of sheer dismay started his own religious cult (which later came to be known as Wahhabism) which advocated a radical, Sunni exclusionist and puritanism interpretation of the Quran, the so called sharia law, which vehemently differed from other more liberal interpretations prevalent at the time. Wahhabism classifies any deviation from the literal reading of the Quran (including the rejection of the first 3 caliphs by the Shia muslims) as an encroachment on the sovereignty of the Prophet Muhammad's original teachings. Of course although Abd al-Wahhab was not a violent man, his views were inherited by a general by the name of Ibn Saud who used this radical interpretation for his own political gain. Ibn Saud led an army of his followers and invaded several shia dominated villages within the Ottomon Empire (including the holy city of Holy City of Karbala) murdering every man, woman and child in their path. They were essentially waging Jihad - holy war - against the takfir - infidels. Although eventually Ibn Saud was absolutely crushed by Egyptians, this so-called Ikhman, or brotherhood of man, led by Ibn Saud himself, is the original ancestor of every sunni extremist group known to man today, including the Islamic State and Al Qaeda.
But enough of backstory, here's my proposal -
I want to see a film entirely devoted to this man and his family -
The most dangerous man on the planet today.
For those of you who don't know, that is
King Salman of the Saudi family, ruler of Saudi Arabia. With a net worth of over 25 billion dollars, the Saudi family has been one of the most well known and active financiers of global terrorism and the world's biggest exporter of wahhbist extremism. And the sad part is everyone is afraid of getting on his bad side (and rightly so if you ask me because he has the power to cause serious harm to any country in the world, not to mention the billions of muslims who look upon upon him as a godly figure who will seek retribution if any harm is done to him).
The saudi family was founded by a Sunni extremist group and its primary motivation is just to constantly put more and more pressure on Shia dominated countries in the middle east (which includes Iran, which is almost entirely composed of Shia muslims and Iraq, which has had a Shia majority government ever since the appointment Al-Malicki by the Bush administration) which threaten its authority. And that's why the Saudi family keeps funding Sunni extremist groups like ISIS, to try to put more and more pressure on the governments of Syria, Iraq and to a much lesser extent Israel, to undermine their strength and maintain superiority in the middle east.
I know a film of this sort will put anyone involved in it in some serious political hot water (with even the threat of assassination) and I don't think any studio would dare to fund a film on the Saudi family. But this is the story I want to see being told on the big screen, on the Saudi family's influence on exporting the Wahhabist culture. Forget about 9/11, this is far and away the most important political issue of our time and people need to know the truth about how this middle-eastern war began but I guess at this point it's all just wishful thinking.