May 14, 2022, Short 13

Ghosts of Sugar Land is the first documentary short watched during the Saturday Short binge and it was found on Netflix. It was a story of betrayal. A story of religious persecution and radicalization of certain individuals.

The doc was about a man named “Mark” who was a black man hanging out with a group of Muslims until he disappeared into Syria. His friends, wearing superhero masks to hide their identities, speculate about their friend and about what may have been going on with him.

Truthfully, that is about all this doc does. It has this group of people try to guess what Mark did and why he did it. Some speculation had Mark as an FBI spy/informant undercover. Other speculation indicated that he became radicalized some time after his college graduation.

There is not a ton of real facts available in the doc. The final black screen tells us info on what happened to Mark but we never do find out anything about why he did what he did. I’m also not sure of the reason for the masks because the film does give us the real name of Mark at the end so if anyone wanted to figure out who they were, I would think it would be an easy job.

Some of the stories were interesting, but Ghosts of Sugar Land does not seem to go anywhere and come to any real conclusions about its topic.