| The Road to Guantanamo | |
|---|---|
| Directed by | Michael Winterbottom |
| Starring | Rizwan Ahmed, Farhad Harun, Arfan Usman |
| Music by | Molly Nyman Harry Escott |
| Cinematography | Marcel Zyskind |
| Editing by | Mat Whitecross Michael Winterbottom |
| Distributed by | Channel 4 Television Corporation Roadside Attractions A-Film Distribution CTV International Golden Village Entertainment The Klockworx Co., Ltd |
| Release date(s) | 14 February 2006 |
| Running time | 95 mins |
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | Predominantly English |
| Budget | £1.4 million |
The Road to Guantanamo, alternatively The Road to Guantánamo, is a British 2006 docudrama directed by Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross about the incarceration of three British detainees (the 'Tipton Three') at a detainment camp in Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba. It premiered at the Berlinale on 14 February 2006, and first shown in the UK on Channel 4 on 9 March 2006. The following day it was the first film to be released simultaneously in cinemas, on DVD, and on the Internet. It won the Independent Spirit Award for Best Documentary Feature.
Filming took place in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran, which doubled as Cuba. Mat Whitecross is credited as co-director, and handled most of the interviews with the real-life counterparts to the main characters.[1]
The original poster made to promote the film in the United States (shown right) was refused by the Motion Picture Association of America. The reason given was that the burlap sack over the detainee's head was considered to be depicting torture, and therefore inappropriate for young children to see. Howard Cohen of US-distributors Roadside Attractions condemned this as "inconsistent" when compared to the MPAA-approved posters for contemporary horror films such as Hard Candy or Hostel. The final version of the poster showed just the detainee's manacled hands.[2]
Contents |
The film documents the personal accounts of Ruhal Ahmed, Asif Iqbal and Shafiq Rasul (the 'Tipton Three');[1][3][4] three young British men from Tipton in the West Midlands of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origins who travelled to Pakistan in September 2001 just days after the September 11 terrorist attacks in the USA, ostensibly to a wedding of a friend of theirs. While staying at a mosque in Karachi, the three decided to take a rash and dangerous trip to Afghanistan to see first-hand the encounters of the region.
Mixed with interviews with the three men themselves, and archive news footage from the period, the film contains an account of the three men's experiences from their travels into Afghanistan and to their capture and imprisonment.
Travelling by van, Ruhal, Asif, and Shafiq, with two other friends, crossed the border in October 2001 just as US warplanes began attacking Taliban positions all over the country. They made it to Kandahar without incident, and later to the capital city of Kabul a few days later. After nearly a month of "lingering" aimlessly around Kabul, the Tipton Three decided to return to Pakistan. But through a combination of bad luck and the increasing chaos, the friends apparently took the wrong bus which travelled further into Afghanistan towards the north and the front-line fighting between the Taliban and the Northern Alliance rebels. The convoy of vehicles they were riding in was hit by an airstrike, and they were left wandering around the trackless and inhospitable terrain of the unfamiliar country. In mid-November, near the town of Baghlan, the three came across a group of Taliban fighters and asked to be taken to Pakistan, but they all were captured shortly thereafter by Northern Alliance soldiers.
Imprisoned at a base at Mazar-e Sharif, they were interrogated and discovered to be of British origin. With no luggage, money, passports or any kind of identification, Ruhal, Asif, and Shafiq were handed over to the United States military and imprisoned in a US army stockade for a month with other prisoners, being regularly interrogated and occasionally beaten by irate US soldiers, ostensibly in retribution for the 9/11 attacks in their country.
In January 2002, the 'Tipton Three' were declared "enemy combatants" by the US military, and flown with dozens of other alleged Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters to Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, where they remained for the next two years. They were held in mostly solitary confinement without charge or legal representation.
The rest of the film shows several scenes depicting beatings during interrogation, the use of torture techniques such as 'stress positions' and attempts to extract forced confessions of involvement with al-Qaeda and the Taliban. The isolation continued from the Camp X-Ray where they were held as well as another camp. During two years they were subjected to more questioning by US army and Central Intelligence Agency interrogators.
In one incident, one US army guard at Camp X-Ray desecrated one prisoner's Qur'an by throwing it to the ground to incite a reaction from the rest of the prisoners.
In another incident, Ruhal witnessed a group of US soldiers severely beat up one unruly and mentally ill Arab prisoner for not obeying their orders. When Ruhal shouts out to the guards that the beatings and torture are in violation of the Geneva Conventions governing the treatment of POWs, he is responded with laughter from the guards who respond that those laws do not apply to enemy combatants.
The Tipton Three were all released without charge and without any compensation for their imprisonment in 2004. The three were flown back to England where, one year later, they went back to Pakistan for the wedding they planned to attend in the first place.
The torture depicted in the film had to be softened from the detainees' claims for the benefit of the actors; according to Rizwan Ahmed, they were unable to bear the pain caused by the shackles pressing on their legs, and had to have them cushioned. They were also unable to remain in the stress positions depicted for more than an hour; the Tipton Three claim they were left in them for up to eight hours.[5]
The film premiered at the Berlin Film Festival in Berlin, Germany on 14 February 2006. It was broadcast to the UK on Channel 4 on 9 March, attracting 1.6 million viewers,[6] and released on DVD and the Internet the following day. Roadside Attractions, an independent distributor, bought the rights to show the film in the United States in late March.[7]
Iranian authorities not only asked the film's distributor to release the film in Iran, unusual for a Western picture, but, according to the distributor's president, ordered four prints instead of the usual one and offered three times the normal amount. As of late April the film was still awaiting official approval and was expected to be released in late May.[8]
The film received generally positive reviews, garnering an 86% positive rating at Rotten Tomatoes. Michael Winterbottom won the Silver Bear for Best Director at the 2006 Berlin Film Festival.
Commentators have criticised Winterbottom for not questioning the decision of the Tipton Three to enter Afghanistan in the first place; a review in The Times (which gave the film 3 out of 5 stars) refers to this gap as "an insane lack of cool perspective...The sheer stupidity of these Brits mocks the sincerity of the film. Winterbottom refuses to ask the bleeding obvious. His unquestioning faith in his 'cast' is bewildering."[3] Regardless of the wisdom of the men's initial trip, their account of human rights abuses at Guantanamo Bay highlights widespread criticism by organisations such as Amnesty International, who referred to the prison as "the gulag of our times"[9] and world leaders such as German Chancellor Angela Merkel, who stated that "An institution like Guantánamo in its present form cannot and must not exist in the long term"[10].
Four of the actors in the film were detained for about an hour by police at London Luton Airport after returning from the film's premiere in Berlin. Rizwan Ahmed alleged that during questioning police asked him whether he had become an actor to further the Islamic cause, questioned him on his views on the Iraq war, verbally abused him and denied him access to a telephone.[11] He was then asked to become an informant for the police.[5]
A spokesperson for Bedfordshire police said that none of the men were arrested and that the Terrorism Act allows the police to "stop and examine people if something happens that might be suspicious". She did not clarify what the actors had done to arouse suspicion.[11]
In 2007 two members of the Tipton Three - Ruhal Ahmed and Shafiq Rasul - agreed to participate in the Channel 4 documentary Lie Lab in an attempt to prove their innocence of allegations made by the US Government. The technology used on the show was developed by Professor Sean Spence from the University of Sheffield. It uses functional magnetic resonance imaging to look at the activity in the pre frontal cortex to determine the truthfulness of statements. [12] Having previously claimed that he had entered Afghanistan for the purposes of carrying out charity work, Ruhal Ahmed admitted on the programme that he had visited an Islamist training camp, where he handled weapons and learned how to use an AK47. Rasul refused to go through with the test. [13]
In January 2010, both Ruhal Ahmed and Shafiq Rasul confirmed having visited a Taliban training camp, but explained that they were trapped in the province, and had visited only to find out "what was happening"[14]. The presenter observed that Ahmed had also admitted to handling AK47 guns. Shafiq Rasul responded
"Being in Afghanistan, we were at that age where… seeing a gun… you’d never seen a gun in the UK… you want to hold it. You want to see what its like. But we were never there to do any training. That’s what, that’s what, we were just there. We held it to see what it was like. That’s how we’ve explained it. But it has been taken out of context, saying that ‘Oh, these guys from the UK, they were at that age, 9/11 had just happened, and they were there for terrorist training’. But, but – that’s not the case. That’s not what happened"
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||