Eric Baudelaire’s artistic documentary follows the progress of a young man’s journey from France to Syria—and back to France, where he is incarcerated for allegedly joining the so-called Islamic State. The film is based on real events and draws from judicial and police documents. It employs the landscape theory (fukeiron in Japanese) first introduced in the 1969 film AKA Serial Killer by Masao Adachi, who was the subject of Baudelaire’s earlier film works. In Also Known As Jihadi, the character’s paths to radicalism are rendered through a series of landscape shots filmed at the locations he traversed: a biography determined not by what he did, but by what he saw, thereby questioning how these places reflect the social and political structures that form the backdrop for this journey of alienation and return.