According to rahyafte ( the missionaries and converts website): On the evening of January 29, 2017, Alexandre Bissonette entered the Centre Culturel Islamique de Québec (CCIQ) in Quebec City and opened fire shortly after the end of the evening prayers.
Six worshippers were killed and nineteen others injured.
Khaled Belkacemi, 60, Azzedine Soufiane, 57, Abdelkrim Hassane, 41, Mamadou Tanou Barry, 42, Ibrahima Barry, 39, and Aboubaker Thabti, 44, were killed, and 17 children were left without their fathers.
A whole community, a city, an entire country were left in shock.
Four months later,the survivors of the tragic attack and the families of those who perished shared the journey of their grief in order to create the documentary “Your Last Walk in the Mosque”.
The documentary asks the following questions:
What happened inside the mosque on that day?
How is Quebec City’s Muslim community coping with the impact of this traumatic event?
How did the growing political acceptance of Islamophobia lead to such an event?
The film’s producer, Tariq Syed, an active volunteer with the Islamic charitable organization DawaNet and a lead coordinator of that organization’s MuslimFest in Mississauga each year, travelled to Quebec City within days of the shooting. He met with survivors, widows and orphaned children. He attended the funerals for the six victims, both in Quebec City and Montreal.
A month later, he was planning to travel back to Quebec City to deliver funds raised by DawaNet for the families. He was discussing his upcoming trip with a colleague, who then asked him if six or five people had died.
In an interview in a 2018 with the Montreal Gazette, Syed explained his reaction to this question: “I thought to myself: ‘This just happened, and somebody already doesn’t even know how many people died’. It’s one of the worst tragedies in Canada in recent times. And he couldn’t remember — forget about names and everything else — he didn’t even know how many people died. What can I do, from my end, to change that? The best way to capture it was to make a documentary.”
Syed reached out to filmmaker Abderrahmane Hedjoudje, who is based in both the United States and France and who he knew spoke French so would be best placed to do interviews with the survivors. Hedjoudje had previously made an award-winning documentary about Muslims in California. Hedjoudje then brought in Ubaydah Abu Usayd whose talents and interests he felt would be ideal for this project.
n their director’s statement on the documentary’s website, Hedjoudje discusses making the film:
“We arrived from Paris only with a broad idea of what happened on January 29. The French media hardly covered this event, they carefully avoided to raise this issue of Islamophobia as it is linked to some problems that exist in France. When we arrived at the Islamic Center of Quebec four months after the attack, we walked through the door as if we were entering any other mosque in the world.
Source: Muslimlink.ca
