A Jihad for Love

A Jihad for Love (preceded by a short film called In the Name of Allah) is a 2008 documentary film and was the world's first film on Islam and homosexuality. It took a total of six years to make and premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in September 2007. It premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in 2008 as the opening documentary film for the Panorama section. The filmmakers—Director and Producer Parvez Sharma and Producer Sandi Dubowski raised more than a million dollars to make the film. Because of its debut at the TIFF in 2007, this film is often confused as a 2007 film. However, the film is actually a 2008 film since it began its wide film festival, theatrical, broadcast, networks, streaming runs in the same year. Many organizations including the Indo-American Arts Council (on March 8, 2009) considered it a "seminal film" because of its historic significance as the world's first film on this subject. On May 21, 2008, Filmmaker magazine said the same adding that the film was "Shot in 12 countries over six years, Sharma's film is an intelligent and eloquent exposition of a taboo subject that not only movingly pays tribute to the strength and integrity of the film's embattled subjects but – despite its provocative title – maintains a reverent rather than critical attitude towards the Islamic religion. We spoke to Sharma about the difficulties involved in making the film, reclaiming the word "jihad," and designing his own Bollywood film posters as a child."IMDB rates the film at 13 on its list of 58 titles under the category of "Best documentaries on religion, spirituality and cults". The website of the film offers some of the press around the film when it came out and contains an important resources section for LGBT Muslims who are struggling with their identities. The work that Sharma started with the film started to become a staple in many books on Islam and at U.S. University libraries. He wrote the forward for the two part anthology called, "Islam and Homosexuality"On Amazon the film has a customer review average of four and a half stars out of five. On Amazon A Jihad for Love has a rank of 7,653 in the top 100 documentaries. Filmmaker Parvez Sharma was labeled an apostate (kaafir-Arabic), a crime punishable by death by the Tablighi Jamaat in South Africa and several high ranking Salafi/ Wahhabi Sheikhs in Saudi Arabia.[1][2]