The story is magnetic – simple and complex at the same time. It started as a real-life community miracle that took place in the Islamic Center in Muncie, a town of 65,000 residents in East Central Indiana. USA Today wrote about it and director Joshua Seftel saw the article on Facebook, according to the producer of the film, Carmel Valley native Conall Jones. By then, one of the main characters in the story – the former Marine Richard McKinney – was already giving public speeches about the experience.
“It was part of a bigger series, The Secret Life of Muslims [a 2016 documentary TV series by Seftel and Brittany Huckabee],” Jones says. “But this story was special so we took it to a higher level.”
When Jones joined the project, now a 30-minute-long documentary titled Stranger At The Gate, which is nominated for an Academy Award at the March 12 Oscars ceremony, Seftel already had McKinney and Bibi Bahrami on board.
“I got everybody else,” Jones says. “The daughter, the community people.”
McKinney’s stepdaughter is key to the story; it’s for her love and respect he decided to change. She made him think.
Stranger At The Gate is a story about the invisible toll that American military interventions around the world take on generations of American men who are trained to kill foreign-looking people and then are expected to come back home and be good husbands, fathers and neighbors in the increasingly multiracial and multicultural America.
“These people are killers,” McKinney says of his initial reaction to the Muslims he encountered in America, including at his daughter’s school. Like thousands of other American veterans, McKinney suffers from PTSD.
One day, McKinney opened the door to the local Islamic Center with the intention to kill. In doing so he met Bibi and Saber Bahrami, who came to the U.S. in 1986 as refugees of the Soviet war in Afghanistan. “They were happy to be in America, happy to talk to me,” McKinney says. Eight weeks later, he became a Muslim himself.
“The message of the movie is important in the distressing times we live in,” Jones says.
Another producer of the movie is Nobel laureate Malala Yousafzai, who loved the movie so much – you will too – that she joined the project. “It was our dream scenario,” Jones says.
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