WORLDVIEW

Milos Stehlik's Commentaries

	Milos Stehlik

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The Road to Guantanamo is a film of small ambitions, and shot on a small budget. But it was the only film to cause a visible emotional stir in Berlin.

The Road to Guantanamo seems as if it were made in a hurry. But this gives it a sense of urgency. It is what makes it stick in your mind—in shame that the events the film portrays happened during our lives, and on our watch. A German journalist told me after the Berlin screening, “I was always all over my parents, asking ‘Why didn't you do anything while the Nazis came to power?’ And now I ask myself, ‘What am I doing?’”

When The Road to Guantanamo is released in the U.K., it will reportedly play in theatres, on television, be released on DVD, and available for download on the Internet all at the same time.

The film is framed by the testimonies of the three surviving young men from British Midlands who take off on a wedding trip in late September, 2001, for Pakistan. Asif Igbal sets off for Pakistan to meet the bride that his mother has found for him just after 9/11. His friend Ruhel, who agrees to be the best man, follows with two other friends. Clearly, they are having a good time. They are also observantly religious. The four men visit a mosque and hear an Imam call for aid to the people of Afghanistan. The four set off on a bus for the border. It's almost a lark, but they sincerely want to be useful and help. Across the border, the situation is suddenly very different. The first American bombs hit. They find themselves in the middle of a war and try to get back to Pakistan. But now this is difficult. Ruhel, Asif, and Shafiq mix in with the Taliban fighters who are fleeing before the advancing Northern Alliance. Their fourth friend, Monir, is left behind and never heard from again.

Winterbottom sketches all these events at a frenetic pace, interspersed with news footage. Now the three are mixed in with the Taliban and are taken prisoner. They are shipped in an airless container in which many die to the American base in Kandahar. In a horrifying, painful scene, dressed in orange jumpsuits, with headsets and goggles painted over, chained to each other, they are air-lifted and eventually end up in Guantanamo.

Guantanamo is the core of the film. The pace changes in the film. The real-life Rusel, Asif, and Shafiq tell their story to the camera as we then watch the episodes fictionalized and acted out. Very much to his credit, Winterbottom is restrained in what he shows. There are no scenes of sexual humiliation or the kind of torture that's been reported from the prison at Abu Ghraib. Instead, the American treatment of the prisoners is constant and incessant humiliation. They are first put into the cages at Camp X-Ray, where it is unbearably hot, and crawling with snakes and tarantulas at night. The cages look like dog kennels. They can't touch the fence and they are woken up every hour. They are forced into stressful positions, placed in isolation and blasted with loud noise or freezing air. They are beaten. The humiliation never seems to end. The intent is to break them and make them admit that they were a part of Al-Qaeda, which they clearly were not. In a scene which elicited roaring laughter from the Berlin audience, one of the interrogators asks Shafiq, “Where is Osama Bin Laden?”

The Road to Guantanamo was shot on locations in Britain, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Iran. Winterbottom doesn't try to demonize the American soldiers. They come off as part of a military system which has gone awfully awry. In real life, after two years imprisonment and torture, the three British young men were released.

All of the information in The Road to Guantanamo has previously been covered in news reports. But what makes the film so unsettling is that until now, we've heard about it, but we haven't seen it. Winterbottom adds images to the events; faces to the strange names. As President Bush, in a news clip, is seen talking about how the prisoners in Guantanamo are “bad people,” it is clear that the three young Brits were not bad people. They just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time—that, in itself, is no crime.

The Road to Guantanamo is a film that's as important to our age as Z or State of Siege or Sorrow and the Pity were in other times. It shows the face of injustice—it's an image that is almost too terrifying to bear.

This is Milos Stehlik for Chicago Public Radio's Worldview.

Worldview film contributor Milos Stehlik is the director of Facets Multimedia.

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