Ultra-violent TV show aims to stop Brits joining ISIS by showing rapes, floggings and football with a severed head
Wolf Hall director Peter Kosminsky's shocking new drama The State follows three young Brits who travel to Syria to become part of the brutal regime
IT was never intended to make for easy viewing.
But despite showing public whippings, beheadings and rape, director Peter Kosminsky has toned DOWN the violence in new drama The State.
The four-part series follows four Brits who travel to Syria to join ISIS — and is based on true stories.
And he reckons the drama has the power to save lives by deterring impressionable young Muslims from travelling to Syria in the first place.
Peter’s years of research, which began with reading reports in The Sun, saw him interview jihadists, watch videos on social media and read transcripts of phone calls hacked by MI5 between jihadists and their loved ones back home.
Graphic scenes include a hospital ward full of dead babies, children playing football with the hacked-off head of a “non-believer” and ritualistic beatings of women.
However, Peter insists that a truly honest portrayal of the brutality in Raqqa — the ISIS stronghold in Syria — would be too much of an ask.
He said: “ISIS is a violent death cult. It’s all about violence in the way it represents itself on screen.
“An early decision had to be taken on how much of that we would show. If you say we are going to show everything, it would have made the programme unwatchable.
“But if you tone it down so much, you take the point away because it is a very violent regime.
“The events that happen to these fictional characters are all real.
“Everything you see in our series is something that we have read about, been told about, seen or heard in the research.”
The story follows 19-year-old friends Jalal and Ziyaad, who sign up to fight for ISIS alongside junior doctor Shakira — who travels with her nine-year-old son Isaac — and 18-year-old wannabe jihadi bride Ushna, who dreams of being a “lioness among the lions”.
The show aims to humanise the lead characters in a move that risks Peter being labelled an “apologist” for terrorists.
But he believes viewers need to understand that normal people can do awful things.
He said: “It might give us comfort to think ordinary people can’t descend to that level of vileness but history proves that’s rubbish.
“We have to confront the fact that terrible things are done by people who are not inherently evil.
“Let’s not beat around the bush, this is a cautionary tale.
“At the end Shakira says she wants to go public and say, ‘I’ve been there and I can tell you it’s a lie and it’s a mistake’ — and that’s the message of the film.”
Actor Sam Otto, who plays Jalal, says he was shocked by the human cost of the decisions the characters make. He said: “Hopefully people will see that the biggest victim group of the ISIS regime are in fact Muslims. It’s opened my eyes so much.”
Co-star Ryan McKen, who plays Ziyaad, adds that he hopes the show will “expose the propaganda” used to recruit young men and women.
Peter won a Bafta for his 2015 dramatisation of Wolf Hall, which tells the tale of Thomas Cromwell and Henry VIII.
And he believes the subject of Tudor Britain is not that far removed from where ISIS-controlled areas find themselves now.
He said: “If you expressed religious dissent in Henry VIII’s England you were quite likely to have various bits of your anatomy chopped off in public — to be hung, drawn and quartered while still alive.
“It’s not that different from the kinds of punishments and excesses and atrocities which we now see manifest with ISIS.”
- The State begins on Sunday at 9pm on Channel 4.