Chronicling gay Muslim life: filmmaker Parvez Sharma recounts the perils and rewards of producing the documentary a Jihad for love.(PROFILE)

How did your personal experience inform your vision for the film and your relationship with the people you interviewed for it? If I'd not been a Muslim filmmaker, I do not think I would have had the amount of access and the depth of interpersonal relationships that I was able to develop with everyone in the film. I think they trusted me the most, primarily because I am gay and Muslim, and in many cases spoke the language, and in many cases understood a lot of the circumstances that people are coming from and a lot of the challenges that they face. So being Muslim in the West post-Sept. 11--which is not necessarily the best thing that can happen to you at the airport--is also a blessing in other ways when you try to go into "Islamic territory" and make a film as a Muslim.

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Some have asked. "Why don't you Just get out of the religion?" How do you maintain your faith, and how do you think some of your interviewees do, when faced with such hostility from non-Muslims and Muslims alike? It's really hard. I wonder about the necessity of faith sometimes in a world where extremists are increasingly controlling all faiths, be it Christianity or Judaism or Islam. I feel that for a lot of the people in the film, Islamic religiosity is not something that comes in isolation. Our religion is a religion of community, and leaving the religion is not really the easiest thing to do when you have extended families, when you have all your culture, your art, your way of looking at the culture, determined in some ways by your religiosity. It's not easy to leave that.

Were you able to develop strong bonds with people you interviewed? I talk about Mazen, the Egyptian refugee, during the film. Now, here's a man who in his early 20s was arrested by Hosni Mubarak's government in Egypt. Mazen was imprisoned for over a year. The newspaper headlines at that time had said that a cult of Satanists that was developing a new religion had been arrested and were, amongst other vices, indulging in sodomy.

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He was tortured in prison. He was even raped, as he mentions in the film, and while he was out on bail, he fled Egypt and got asylum in France. And I became almost and elder brother to him; I became his closest confidante for the first two years, affirming with him.

I even shared the same bed with him as he cried all night, and I held him because I realized that this was also a victim of some pretty ...