Documentaries allegorize transnational spectatorship in surprising ways.
Mr. Gay Syria
dir. Ayşe Toprak, 2017, Turkey/France/Germany
genre: character-driven
Mr. Gay Syria is a good example of the pretext documentary. There is no Mr. Gay Syria contest or winner prior to the attempt of journalist-activist Mahmoud Hassino to use the Mr. Gay World idea to draw international attention to the difficulty of LGBT refugees, in particularly the Syrian refugees in Turkey. Quite possibly, the contest would proceed without the documentary but it’s clear that that the filming has added to the stakes of Mr. Gay Syria:
- The actual contest fails to generate the publicity Hassino wants, and the documentary, for all of the limitations of festival distribution, offers more.
- The subjects are concerned about the impact of visiblity, and the film exacerbates this. (From what I gather the film has not yet shown publicly in Turkey but is scheduled to.)
- The crowd-funding dimension of the production ties the film to an international LGBT and rights community in a way that Mr. Gay World does not.
Hassino frames his idea by the desire to give an alternative to the common images (namely, death) of Syrian LGBT people. So Mr. Gay World is from the start an intervention in documentary ethics. Ultimately, the film splits the difference. It does present a different image of gay and bi Syrian men but does gravitate toward a character-driven issue-doc portrait around two of its subjects, Hussain and Omar.
But I’m impressed with the way the film serves as two things at once: a straight-forward character-driven documentary that addresses an international human-rights spectator, and a subtly meta-critical documentary that is about the tension between international spectatorship and the life of the documentary subject.
