Movies - The Road to Guantanamo

Home > Listing Index > Movies > The Road to Guantanamo

	Movies - The Road to Guantanamo

The Road to Guantanamo is a 2006 docu-drama directed by Michael Winterbottom about the incarceration of three British detainees at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba. It was premiered at the Berlinale on 14th February, 2006, and first shown in the UK on Channel 4 on 9th March, 2006. The following day it was the first film to be released simultaneously in cinemas, on DVD and on the Internet.

Filming took place in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran, which doubled as Cuba. Mat Whitecross is credited as co-director.

Synopsis

The film tells the story of Ruhal Ahmed, Asif Iqbal and Shafiq Rasul (the 'Tipton Three'); three young British men from Tipton in the West Midlands who were captured by the Northern Alliance in Afghanistan in 2001 and imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay, without charge or legal representation, for nearly three years. As well as interviews with the three men themselves and archive news footage from the period, the film contains a dramatised account of the three men's experiences following their capture by the Northern Alliance, the subsequent handover to the United States military and their detention in Cuba. It contains 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 Tipton Three were all released without charge in 2004.

Reception

Michael Winterbottom won the Silver Bear for Best Director at the 2006 Berlin Film Festival.

Commentators have criticised Winterbottom for not questioning the accounts of the Tipton Three; 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". However, the charge that human rights abuses have taken place at Guantanamo Bay echos widespread criticism by organisations such as Amnesty International, who referred to the prison as "the gulag of our times" 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" .

Actors detained

Four of the actors in the film were detained for about an hour by police at 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.

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.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for The Road to Guantanamo ]

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article The Road to Guantanamo; it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.

Searches on eBay