TORONTO - When Jerry Ciccoritti began filming "The Terrorist Next Door," he sat down with the actors and crew and asked them to step back in time.
"I gave the actors little tricks, homework assignments when they go home at night: OK, there's no such thing as BlackBerrys, hardly anyone has a cellphone," said the director of the movie, which airs Sunday on CTV. "There's no X-box . . . the Internet's still relatively new.
"We talked about that a lot, the entire cast and even the crew," said Ciccoritti. "It's amazing how much the world has changed."
Inspired by real events, "The Terrorist Next Door" takes place in the 1990s and follows the story of Ahmed Ressam, an Algerian immigrant who came to Canada in 1994.
He became infamous as "the Millennium Bomber" after he was caught trying to cross the border in 1999 from Canada to the United States with 50 kilograms of explosives. His target was Los Angeles International Airport.
The film, said Ciccoritti, is meant to quash stereotypes, not villainize Ressam.
"It's not my job to point fingers and say 'This is a really bad guy,"' said Ciccoritti. "As entertainment, that's boring and without value. I'm more interested in letting people know 'This could be you, with different circumstances."'
The film follows a young man who arrives in Canada full of hope, eager to succeed in his new country.
In Montreal, Ressam (Chenier Hundal) meets obstacles everywhere he turns: universities won't honour his previous studies; girls ignore him in bars; the only job he can find is in a restaurant run by a fellow immigrant.
He eventually bows to pressure from his Muslim peers and gets more involved in an al-Qaida sleeper cell, whose members offer him a sense of belonging and financial security. He becomes increasingly radical, egged on by Majid (Reda Guerinik), who leads the cell.
Majid is married to Nicole, a Canadian who converted to Islam for her husband. A CSIS agent tailing her husband happens to be an old high school fling, who tries in vain to warn her of Majid's true identity.
Years pass, and Ressam ends up in an al-Qaida training camp in Afghanistan, run by Osama bin Laden, while Nicole remains unconvinced that her husband is a terrorist.
Actress Kathleen Robertson, who plays Nicole, said it was a challenge to understand the naivete of the character now that people are accustomed to the threat of terrorism.
"I just had to keep reminding myself, this was pre-9-11," said Robertson in phone interview from her home in Los Angeles.
"It was such a different time. It's just crazy to think how much things have changed in nine years."
Ressam's character is the only one based on a real person, while the others are composites, said Ciccoritti.
As depicted in the movie, Ressam isn't entirely true to history. Some biographical facts were changed or omitted to make the character less villainous.
"Ressam was actually much, much more of a bad guy than we deal with in the movie," said Ciccoritti. "In a movie like this, you want to have an emotional truth as opposed to a historical truth."
Ciccoritti also had writer Suzette Couture add material discussing the nature of Islam in an effort to educate viewers. He said he wants people to know that Islam is no more violent than any other religion.
The director, who said he pursues films about immigrants' experiences given his own background as a second-generation Italian immigrant (he adapted Nino Ricci's "Lives of the Saints" for TV), said he's not sure if "The Terrorist Next Door" will have the desired effect of making people better understand Islam.
"If it does anything, I don't know," said Ciccoritti.
News from �The Canadian Press, 2008
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