Four Lions – Chris Morris’ New Film

Chris Morris has made a film about a group of British suicide bombers. Four Lions, which was partially funded by Film4, was screened last night at the Sundance film festival in Utah, The Guardian reports.

Morris is known to have worked on little else over the last five years, apparently.

“Chris has spent an incredible amount of time immersing himself in Islam, terror and counter-terror,” a friend told the Observer. “He has toured Britain and met dozens of radicals, ex-radicals, academics, journalists and British Asians. He sat in on high-profile terror trials for weeks, read the key texts and recent books, has gone to innumerable ­public meetings, met community groups, and made it his business to educate himself on the nature of fundamentalism.”

In 2007, writing in the Observer, Morris took author Martin Amis to task for “railing” against Muslims and suggested that “the way out of this mess (and it is a mess, fuelled by ignorance, stupidity, prejudice and weapons) is to clarify and discriminate rather than hurl abuse at anything that goes near a mosque”.

A colleague of Morris said: “Its target is ideology, and what happens when people are gripped by something that they have debased and abstracted to the point of insanity. That’s when the trouble starts.”

Four Lions is released in Britain later this year.