A short film made by the ex-classmates of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is set to premiere at this year’s Tribeca film festival.
The 12-minute-long Jahar (Tsarneav’s American nickname), focuses on the emotions experienced by two of his friends in the days after the bombings.
Writers Henry Hayes and Zolan Kanno-Youngs stress that rather than being an investigation into the incident, the film is about the effect that the bombing had on those who knew Tsarnaev.
“We weren’t going into it trying to unravel why he did it,” said Kanno-Youngs, who now writes for the Wall Street Journal. “We were going into it to tell a story about the other types of pain that he caused – the collateral damage – about how it hurt his friends.”
In the film, three characters act as composites of Tsarnaev’s friends, as they watch news coverage of the attack and the shootout that followed.
Tsarnaev was 19 when he was involved in the bombing, which, after the shootout, left six dead and 280 injured. At the time he was a student at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. After being convicted, he was sentenced to death in 2015.
“It’s very easy, I think, to label somebody a terrorist and have this narrative of them being a loner, a sociopath,” Kanno-Youngs said. “The fact is, that’s not who many people remember this person being. It’s more complicated than that. It’s more complex. This is somebody we once called ‘friend’. That being said, when someone does something like that, that person you knew is gone.”
