Deeyah Khan had a simple question for her new documentary: ‘Is it possible for me to sit with my enemy and for them to sit with theirs’? She got an answer – but not without a few tricky moments …

Last summer, the documentary film-maker Deeyah Khan started to receive the sort of threats – of being raped, tortured, gassed and killed – that vocal women from minority groups often get with hateful frequency. In a BBC interview, Khan had made the apparently contentious point that Britain was never going to be all-white and that we should build a future where we all belong. She was used to racial abuse – as a child growing up in Norway (her mother is from Afghanistan; her father from Pakistan), she knew of neo-Nazi marches, and her brother was once chased by racists and had to hide under a car. But the abuse she received last year was particularly vile and relentless, and Khan decided she didn’t want to be afraid of this generation of newly emboldened white supremacists any longer. Instead, she thought, she would try to find out what made them think and say the things they did.

The result is her film White Right: Meeting the Enemy. It focuses on the rise of nationalism in Donald Trump’s America, from the “alt-right” to all-out neo-Nazis. She spent time with various leaders in the movement, going to their meetings, including the August rally in Charlottesville where Heather Heyer, an anti-racist campaigner, was killed. She hung out with the followers of the movement, going out at night in the car with one as he leafleted a Jewish area with hate-filled flyers. She also met former neo-Nazis. “I’m a woman of colour,” she says at the beginning of the film as she sits down to interview Jared Taylor, a well-known white supremacist. “I am the daughter of immigrants. I am a Muslim. I am a feminist. I am a lefty liberal. And what I want to ask you is: am I your enemy?”

She says she felt frightened “many times” during the making of this film. “Even when I started getting comfortable with some of the people [she spent time with and got to know], the people on the periphery could be very unpleasant.” It didn’t make it into the film, but after the rally in Charlottesville, Khan and a colleague joined a neo-Nazi “afterparty” at a compound in the hills, which started to get out of hand. “They were starting to pull their guns. And not just guns, but, like, war-zone weapons. They had just come from Charlottesville and they were amped up from the fighting. I was looking around, going: ‘I’m not going to make it out.’”

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Her main reason for doing the film, she says, when we meet in a hotel in London, wasn’t “to find out how horrible they are – I already know what they stand for, I’m not interested in their ideology. What I was interested in was trying to find the human beings behind the facade and to see what else there is to these people – and is it possible for me to sit with my enemy and for them to sit with theirs?”

Khan says she knows it would have been easy to make a film showcasing only how horrific these extreme views are – and there is plenty of that here – “and then we think we’ve done a really good job, but in a way we haven’t because that’s how they want to be presented. I do believe that it’s possible to hold their opinions in complete contempt and not dehumanise them. I wasn’t looking for them to say and do shocking things, get that on camera and leave. I was looking for something else. The layers and depths of who we are as human beings, that’s what I’m obsessed by. What makes people do the things they do? What makes people who they are?”

This is Khan’s fourth film. In Norway, she had a career as a singer, becoming a pop star, but moved to London at 17. Having become more involved in activism, Khan had become frustrated at the lack of Muslim women’s voices in public and set up the online magazine sister-hood 10 years ago, a platform “for people, including myself, to tell the stories that we believe in and to contribute to the wider conversations in our societies and communities.”

Khan felt that Muslim women were being talked about but not listened to. “People don’t want to engage. [They think]: ‘Maybe it’s your culture to be beaten or cut, or to be threatened, so we won’t get involved.’ As if my culture is to be abused; as if the only people who get to define my culture are abusive men, not the men who aren’t abusive, or people like me.”

It was around the same time that she came across the story of Banaz Mahmod, the 20-year-old London woman of Iraqi Kurd heritage who was killed by her family after divorcing her husband and falling in love with another man. Khan had never made a documentary before, but, with very little money and some Googled instructions on how to use film-editing software, she made Banaz: A Love Story. She planned to give the film away to women’s rights groups until it was picked up by ITV. Her dealings with the TV industry hadn’t been great – one channel said she could be credited as a researcher and they would get a “real director” in. She refused; the film won an Emmy award for best international current-affairs film.

In White Right, the men who emerge are strikingly similar to the men in Khan’s previous film, Jihad, which explored what attracted British recruits to the jihadi movement. “Their cause is different, but their motivations and the personality types are the same. You have the guy who just wants violence and wants to find a cause he can dress his violence with. But the vast majority of the people are either lost and looking for a sense of belonging or looking for a sense of purpose. This is true for the jihadis and these guys here. They’re looking for something to contribute to and give to the world – in their opinion – in a positive way.”

Khan has come away from her recent experience, she says, both more afraid and less. “What makes me more afraid is how organised, how galvanised [the white far right] are. They truly believe they are the victims. They feel like they have everything to lose and that’s worth fighting for.” But she also feels less frightened, personally, than she did. “I spent my life hounded by men like this and I left liberated from the fear because I realised they’re people who are just as messed up, in pain, broken or struggling as any of us. They just don’t have either the support or means to deal with some of the things they’re dealing with in a healthy way. I absolutely am not asking for people to feel sympathy for these guys – I don’t feel sympathy for them – but that does not exclude my ability to try to empathise with them. Having experienced racism my whole life, I decided that hating them or being afraid wasn’t enough for me any more.”

White Right: Meeting the Enemy is on ITV on 11 December at 10.40pm