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The Road To Guantanamo film review
THE ROAD TO GUANTANAMO
Running time: 95 mins
Starring: Farhad Harun, Arfan Usman, Rizwan Ahmed, Waqar Siddiqi, Shahid Iqbal
Michael Winterbottom's latest film tells the incredible story of how three young lads from Tipton ended up in the world's most notorious maximum security jail. Their case, which made international headlines, ended with them being released and found innocent of all charges, and now Britain's most versatile director shows exactly how it all happened. Told in the young men's own words, The Road to Guantanamo is not an easy film to watch, but it is one of the most important films of the year and one which deserves as wide an audience as possible.
In October 2001 - a month after the attack on New York - a small group of young British Muslims left the West Midlands for Pakistan, where they were to attend the wedding of a friend. They found a country in a confused state of political and spiritual turmoil. For reasons which are never satisfyingly made clear (they either acted under the influence of the radical diatribes they heard being preached in the streets of Karachi, or because of youthful exuberance) they group decided to leave Pakistan for neighbouring Afghanistan. Given the political climate at the time, this was not a wise move.
If Pakistan was showing glimpses of occasional extremism, Afghanistan was on another level altogether. With the feared Taliban clinging on to power, the Allied forces were employing everything in their arsenal to bring the regime to its knees. They boys soon realised this: the continual bombing made it hard to ignore. Deciding to leave the country, they cadged lifts from strangers who promised them one thing but delivered another. Soon they were in the middle of a completely alien country and right in the firing line of a massive military onslaught.
This is where their story begins to get really messy: split up by an air strike, the boys are eventually rounded up by American forces and kept prisoner for a number of months in conditions that clearly would test the Geneva convention. Psychological torture and brutal bullying was rife and they all felt the brunt of it. Nevertheless, the treatment in Afghanistan was just the tip of the iceberg. When they were hooded and put on a non-stop flight to Cuba, it seemed that any form of salvation was nigh on impossible. In Camp X-Ray, they spent two years living in cages in atrocious conditions and being treated like animals, from being forbidden to speak to the infamous torture techniques used by the so-called forces of good.
This makes for compulsive but extremely uncomfortable viewing. If you saw the lorry scene in In This World (the Winterbottom film this most resembles), then you may have some idea of what to expect. A similar scene in this film, in which a crowd of prisoners are hoarded on to a locked lorry and left to die, is just one example. The various ways in which pain - both mental and physical - is inflicted on the group are some of the most harrowing scenes in recent cinema.
Winterbottom uses a style similar to Kevin Macdonald's Touching the Void, in which the real men tell their tale to a single camera, while actors recreate their terrible journey. It's a decision that pays off, as it not only makes the film believable, but shows the resilience of these extraordinary characters. The inner strength they found to survive an ordeal which is almost beyond imagination is a testament to the human spirit. The film also, cleverly, avoids making a political statement: while some of the antics of the Americans are clearly beyond the pale, some of them are shown in a positive and helpful light. If anything the picture's message is about man's inhumanity to man and it's mind-boggling to think that events such as these can occur in the 21st century. Essential viewing.
Paul Hurley
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