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Special Events The Madrid Connection – Documentary Screening and Discussion
• Sunday Times critique of The Madrid Connection Join us for a screening and discussion of a documentary film about the Madrid train bombings, entitled The Madrid Connection. Following the film will be a discussion with the director, Justin Webster, who will be joined by Scott Atran, Presidential Scholar at John Jay College, and Mark Sageman, Forensic Psychiatrist and Senior Research Fellow at the Center on Terrorism. Atran and Sageman have conducted their own research on the 2004 Madrid Bombings, focusing on how jihadist networks form and change over time. The film explores the lives and stories of the two men who became the leaders of the terrorist cell that committed the Madrid bombings on March 11, 2004. One, a Tunisian would-be intellectual who spun into increasingly extremist circles, the other, an extremely violent Moroccan drug dealer: they lived in separate worlds - the criminal underworld and religious extremism - until their paths crossed six months before the bombing. The film is a journey into those worlds through their stories, recreating their lives through first hand witnesses. It is an untold, deeply revealing and dramatic story. Counting on two years of investigation, completely exclusive access and material and carefully styled and pitched reconstruction, the film focuses on the personal stories and worlds of the cell leaders: it draws from the trial – a fascinating secondary narrative - but goes further back and beyond. It also takes us further away to Istanbul, Tunisia, Amsterdam and Morocco - to how Al Qaeda communicates and operates, and to the forces that shaped the cell leaders - to come back to the centre of all the connections, Madrid in early 2004, the city which suffered Europe's worst al Qaeda inspired atrocity. It is only now possible to tell it after the verdict of the trial in Madrid of 29 alleged members or collaborators in the terrorist plot. This 90 minute feature piecing together the psychological paths and the events leading up to the Madrid bombing is the fruit of more than two years of investigation by an award winning team including Spanish judicial experts. The story could only have been uncovered after examining over 100,000 of judicial documents, and recording some 400 hours of court footage. But the film goes much further: JWP Productions own investigation and access to exclusive primary sources, provide a far deeper insight through narrative into how the possibility of the bombings grew over time. Much will be completely new, in Spain and abroad. For questions about the screening, please contact terrorism@jjay.cuny.edu |
Charles B. Strozier, Director |
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