It’s hard to say if cinematic skill or political guts had most to do with Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross’s taking home the Silver Bear award for Best Director from February’s Berlin Film Festival. Probably both – and the timing didn’t hurt, either.
Winterbottom and Whitecross’s The Road to Guantanamo – a docudrama that blends interviews, news footage and re-enactments to tell the story of three British Muslims mistakenly seized as Taliban fighters in Afghanistan and held for more than two years at America’s military base at Guantanamo – had its world premiere the same day the UN released a report calling for the detention centre’s closure. Coincidence? Most likely.
But whether – and how quickly – the US shuts down its secretive base on Cuba was, after all, the motive driving the British directors to make the film.
“We’re not trying to say Americans are bad,” Winterbottom told a buzzing audience of foreign journalists after the opening screening. “We made the film to remind people how shocking and bizarre it is that something like Guantanamo exists. The fact that Americans are behaving so badly [in the film] isn’t a dramatic device – it’s what was happening.” As for the reaction to the film by the US and British governments: “I don’t really care, to be honest,” Winterbottom said.
Guantanamo led a handful of politically charged films at this year’s Berlinale – including a mockumentary about terrorists kidnapping and putting on trial the Italian premier in Bye Bye Berlusconi!; Udi Aloni’s Forgiveness, weighing the deep psychological costs of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict; and V for Vendetta, the Wach-owski brothers’ (The Matrix) futuristic vision of fascism and revolution in London. What set Guantanamo apart wasn’t just its graphic portrayal of the American-led war on terror – but its use of actual victims from that war to tell the story.
The film opens with three young Muslim men from Tipton, England – playing the real-life figures Ruhel Ahmed, Shafiq Rasul and Monir Ali – travelling to their friend Asif Iqbal’s wedding in Pakistan. Once there they decide, for reasons the movie doesn’t quite explain, to venture “as volunteers” into Afghanistan on the eve of the US bombing. The men, all in their early twenties, spend several weeks in Kabul and other towns before being rounded up by the Northern Alliance and handed over to American forces as suspected Taliban fighters. Interrogated and abused at Kandahar Air Base in Pakistan, they’re then flown to Guantanamo where they’re probed for 26 months, under brutal circumstances, for supposed links to al-Qaeda. They undergo beatings, moral degradation, solitary confinement and other forms of torture before being released into British custody and freed without charge in the spring of 2004.Therefore whenever your impotency affected body wants to avail back its stamina and strength you can impute this medicament in order to get back your sexual strength without any further worry and complications. generic levitra online In order to keep its effects sustain levitra pharmacy purchase for many days, it is necessary to store this pill anywhere away from light, moisture, and heat. It is also the first sidewinder gaming mouse tadalafil generic india having a wireless connection. But, what if you become incapable of fulfilling viagra generico cialis yours as well as your partner’s needs? It sure is tragic.
“It was hard to sleep [after my release],” Rasul, wearing a Nike beanie and a long black beard, said after attending the film’s premiere. He was interviewed, along with Ahmed and Iqbal, during the six-month period it took to shoot the film, and their first-hand accounts are interspersed, with powerful effect, throughout. “I’d be hearing banging on my cage, soldiers yelling, and I’d wake up sweating. But you have to start living your life again.”
(Rasul and Ahmed, along with the two actors who play them in the film, were detained for anti-terror questioning on their February 16 arrival back at Luton Airport, England, following the Berlin screening. According to the Bedfordshire police, all were released within the hour.)
For Winterbottom – whose film In This World, about Afghan refugees, won the Golden Bear in Berlin in 2003 – making Guantanamo meant trying to awaken “as many people as possible” not just to the drama of the Tipton Three’s story, but to the fact that 500 prisoners are still being detained – and tortured – in Cuba without charge or access to a trial. “This place has been created as a sort of legal black hole where there is no recourse to the law,” he told German weekly Der Spiegel. “You can’t defend freedom by locking people up without justice. People have lost sight of what words mean and what truth is.”
The movie aired on British television, and was simultaneously released on DVD and the internet, earlier this month. Though its sale and distribution to the US still wasn’t settled at press time, one thing is sure: Americans will squirm when they watch their countrymen portrayed as the undisputed villains and Nazi-like thugs in this facet of today’s global war.