What inspires the Osamas of this world? What drives people who are prepared to sacrifice their lives, utterly convinced that this is the only way to save or create the world as they want it to be?

These are the urgent questions which two Polish filmmakers, Marcin Mamon and Mariusz Pilis, have asked warlords, clan-leaders, emirs, mullahs, and common believers around the world for more than ten years. The Smell of Paradise is a road movie, a personal adventure, not without personal risk, that starts in Chechnya in 1995, and ends in Waziristan, along the Afghan-Pakistan border, in the Summer of 2004. The film maps out the ideas of the “fundamentalist international,” ideas that put to the test our Western democratic beliefs about society.

The Smell of Paradise was shot in Chechnya, Dagestan, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Qatar and Afghanistan, in places that have become white spaces on the map of Western journalism. It takes the viewer not only into a different world, but also to another time. The result is a unique glance into the land of the jihad, the mental and physical battle that drives the Islamic fundamentalist movement.

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To purchase the film, visit Film Transit International.