The feature film debut of Meg Smaker, Jihad Rehab uses extraordinary access to tell the story of the attempted de-radicalization of a small group of former Guantanamo Bay detainees at a Saudi Arabian rehabilitation center. In the process, it asks viewers to consider the legacy and still-rippling impacts of the events of September 11, 2001.

At one point home to nearly 800 prisoners vacuumed up in America’s sprawling “war on terror,” Gitmo, as it was called, was from the beginning an extrajudicial nightmare, for reasons ranging from dubious legality to confessions and other evidence compromised by torture.

Starting in 2005, prisoners began to be repatriated to their native countries. (Slightly more than three dozen remain today.) Except, that is, from Yemen, whose citizens were barred from re-entry to their homeland. An agreement was eventually struck for many of them to undergo intensive counseling, for a period of not less than one year, at a newly constructed facility bearing the name of Mohammad Bin Naif, then Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia.

Jihad Rehab hones its focus for the most part on three such Yemeni men: Nadir, Mohammed, and Ali. One is alleged to have been a former bodyguard of Osama bin Laden; Ali, only 16 when he was sent to Gitmo, was the younger brother Qassim al-Raymi, the leader of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.

Over the course of several years, Smaker chronicles everything from their counseling sessions and interpersonal skill training classes to weekend-pass furloughs and eventual release. The result is a clear-eyed, humanizing look at the cultural differences and tangled geopolitical priorities that complicate attempts to dismantle ideologies that either breed or embrace terrorism.

That doesn’t mean the film has landed without controversy. Some have taken issue with the movie’s (sparse) use of the word terrorist, despite the subjects never being charged or facing trial. (The first time each man is introduced, a list of what the U.S. government has accused them of appears, and the movie gives each man the chance to speak.)

Others have levied criticisms seemingly rooted more in personal identity. (Smaker is an Arabic speaker who lived in Yemen for five years but is Caucasian and not Muslim.)

“Prior to living in the Middle East, I was definitely, I think, your typical American,” said Smaker during the Sundance Q&A session following her film’s premiere. “I come from a very conservative family. My parents voted for (Donald) Trump not once, but twice. I had a very different worldview than I do now.

“All of my preconceived notions and the filter with which I viewed the region was all gleaned through mainstream media. When I moved to Yemen, all those preconceived notions directly contradicted or conflicted with what I experienced when I was in the country. All the stories I heard, all the interactions I had, all of that just challenged everything I had thought I knew.

“I think at that time I was quite young, and you have this very assured view of the world. Having this really human experience in Yemen and meeting people and working there, living there and being part of a community really made me see the world in a different light.”

Smaker’s path to moviemaking was a somewhat atypical one as well. “Before I was a filmmaker, I was a firefighter,” she said. “I loved it and I always thought I would be one. I went from firefighting in California for what was back then called CDF, but is now called Cal Fire, to eventually teaching and running a firefighting academy in Yemen, teaching young men how to fight fire.”

It was there that she first learned of the Bin Naif Center. “I heard about it on the fire grounds one day when some of the cadets were talking about it. They referred to this thing in Saudi Arabia, what they called ‘jihad rehab.’ That was the first time I heard about it, and it always stuck with me,” said Smaker. “It just seemed like a really interesting idea, because at the time, Saudi Arabia was not known for its human rights record, and them having a rehabilitation program seemed a bit strange and out of character.”

After connecting with Bryan Storkel, who would become her co-producer on the project, Smaker applied an indefatigable doggedness to her pursuit of the idea. “It took about a year to get access. It was a very long time and about a year of backchanneling,” she said. “If you’ve ever worked or operated in an authoritative regime, there are official channels that you go through.

“Those official channels are put there to keep people like me out, filmmakers and journalists. So, if you’re going to operate somewhere like Saudi Arabia, it’s all back-channeling and building relationships.

“What I was originally asking for was one-year unfettered access to both the prison and the rehab center. They had never given that before, so it was a big ask. With places like this, they never tell you no, they just throw up hurdle after hurdle after hurdle until you eventually just give up. I just didn’t give up,” she said.

The Saudi government finally relented, granting Smaker physical access to the facility, but forbidding her from filming at all unless a detainee agreed on their very first day to be part of her proposed project. “In the beginning, I sat down with a group of older Al-Qaeda guys from Guantanamo, and they didn’t want to talk to me, understandably so, and a group of younger ISIS guys as well,” she said. “I would sit down with them and speak with them in Arabic, and they would ignore me. And I totally understand why.

“But then something very serendipitous happened,” Smaker continued. “That was also the same time that Saudi Arabia let in its first batch of non-Saudi nationals into the program, and they just happened to be from Yemen. So, when I started speaking to them, I was speaking in my Yemeni Arabic, and all their heads popped up and they’re like, ‘Why do you speak our mother tongue?’ I was like, ‘Oh, I used to live in Yemen.’ They’re like, ‘Where did you live?’ There was this immediate rapport that happened, and we talked for hours.

“And then at the end of it I asked if any of them would be willing to continue the conversation, and a couple of them raised their hands. From there, word spread, and doors just opened. I talked to a lot of the men, both in the prison and in the rehab center, and it wound up being about 150 to 200 of the guys, with interviews lasting from 10 minutes to 10 hours.

“From that, there were a couple of guys who agreed to be on-camera but wanted their face blurred. We wanted to be able to look at these men in the eye, and I think that empathy and trying to find that human connection, you need to see someone’s face. So, it kind of was self-selecting, the guys who wanted to talk but wanted to be disguised versus the guys that were okay being on camera. From that number, there were a couple of guys, and that’s how we wound up with the group that we wound up following for about three years.”