"Road to Guantanamo" tells the story of the Tipton Three, Asif Iqbal, Ruhel Ahmad, and Shafiq Rasul, who traveled to Pakistan with the missing fourth of their cohort, Monir Ali, in mid-September 2001. The reason they gave for this trip was that Asif's family had advised him to get married, and they had found a suitable girl near their native village. He went first, and the others followed him in short order. All were young, in their late teens and early twenties, and, like many young men do, they wanted to find an adventure. They found it, in spades. This film tells that story.
The movie opened here in Amsterdam this week, and I caught the early show Saturday evening at the Uitkijk, not far from Leidseplein. It's pretty easy to know you've got the right place: after all, it's hard to miss the poster, depicting a couple of men in orange jumpsuits, kneeling in the dirt between chain link fences, with burlap bags over their heads. I decided I needed to see it here, because I wasn't sure I would even be able to find it in the U. S. (More below the fold.)
But sure enough, it will be released in the States: Roadside Attractions has picked up its distribution. But don't expect to see the same poster I did, since the MPAA has decided that that would too much for pre-teens and children to see at the theater or in magazines and newspapers. The American release date is June 23. If you get a chance to see this, by all means go.
I expected to see a film unrelentingly angry in tone, excessively violent, and ferociously political. There is some anger, yes, but it is muted, even at the end. There is violence, but nothing out of context or even really that outrageous. If you've ever seen the Mel Gibson film "Payback" and not cringed, you'll be fine with this. In fact, I only flinched once, and I am extremely squeamish (as in the battlefield gore in "Braveheart" damned near made me physically ill). It is political, in the sense that the second-wave feminists have always used it, "The personal is political." What happened to these young men in Afghanistan and afterwards was driven by political events and determined by tide of global outrage after 9-11. It is a political film in that these events were extremely personal, and the fallout they've experienced as a result of this nightmare has shaped the kind of men these boys have become.
The film is structured as a docu-drama: interviews with the real Tipton Three are interspersed in the narrative story arc, with Riz Ahmad, Farhad Arun and Arfan Usman portraying the friends in the story. It was filmed extensively on location: United Kingdom, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Iran. The cutting back and forth works rather well, especially in the scenes depicting their initial arrival in Karachi. The film starts out reminiscent of a typical buddy movie: four guys, childhood friends, all grown up and seeing one of their numbers get safely married and settled. It turns into the Pakistan road trip from hell, complete with all the travelers' nightmares typical for newcomers to the subcontinent: Delhi belly (the absolutely explosive diarrhea that you get if you're not careful about where you eat or drink), the packed buses with people riding on the roof, the chaotic streets, the attempt to make your Urdu or Hindi comprehensible to the locals. Add in the desire of these lower-middle-class working stiffs to make this trip less financially difficult by sleeping in the retiring rooms at mosques (this is actually really common in both India and Pakistan, especially at the big Sufi shrines like Devi Sharif outside Lucknow, and the Sikhs also offer sex-segregated communal sleeping quarters for travelers at their gurudwaras, especially the one in Amritsar), and you have the makings of a trip totally incomprehensible to any Westerner who has never been there, never done that, but one perfectly normal to the backpacker set who have done "crazy" things like this.
I got the sense that these were conventionally devout Muslims, not the diehard jihadis that the U. S. government wanted to portray. They went to Friday prayers in Pakistan, as normal, and given the context, it would have been expected for them to attend. They said the imam preached compassion and service to the Afghans, many of whom had long been refugees in Pakistan, and urged his flock to go help the Afghans and ease their suffering. There is no mention in the film at all of fiery slay-the-infidel join-al-Qaeda jihadi-style sermons preached in Karachi. Ruhel, Shafiq and Monir go to Asif's family village, talk him into one final glorious knights-errant type adventure and off the four go towards Afghanistan, crossing near Quetta. They emphasized that no one they talked to believed that there would be any military response to 9-11.
It was their misfortune to arrive in Kandahar when the bombing campaign began. They begin to try frantically to return to Pakistan via Kabul, but as luck would have it, they kept being driven further and further east and north into the country, away from Pakistan. All Urdu speakers, none of them knew Pashto, the language of that part of Afghanistan. They eventually are dropped at Kunduz, where the fun really begins: Kunduz, full of foreign fighters, becomes a charnel house as the Northern Alliance broke through, and the four were trapped with no way out. In the chaos, they lose Monir Ali. He has never been found, no-one knows what happened to him, and it may well be that his bones lie in a mass grave somewhere outside Kunduz. Despite the Northern Alliance's promises of good treatment of fellow Muslims, none of those captured were treated well. From there on out, the nightmare becomes worse and worse for the Tipton Three, as they are transferred into a container truck at Mazar-i-Sharif and shipped to Sherbegan prison under American control. After months there on starvation rations, they were transferred to Camp X-ray at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The scenes following the fall of Kunduz evoke a gamut of emotion, from horror, to disgust, to sheer mocking laughter. In particular, the depiction of the transfer via container truck sticks in my memory: once the doors were closed, the Northern Alliance soldiers "ventilated" it, shooting holes into the top half of its sides. No matter, for it became a stifling tomb, with most of its human cargo dead on arrival. The scenes where we first see the prisoners, shackled, in orange jumpsuits with burlap sacks over their heads and earmuffs, and surgical masks, especially now that we know of Abu Ghraib, make one shake. There were gunpoint interrogations, beatings, near-attacks by the service police forces' dogs as men ran from showers clad only in towels, and even the deceit of a faux British officer (actually an American officer in British uniform speaking in classic West End/Oxbridge tones) threatening to have their families deported from Britain. The guards in Cuba do almost nothing but curse at the prisoners. The techniques used to break them, to elicit false confessions add up to mental torture: forcing them to look at pornographic photographs, tossing around a copy of the Koran in one of the cell cages, the use of stress positions for hours at a time in rooms with strobe lights flashing endlessly, death metal rock blasting, and solitary confinement. One set of scenes had the entire audience laughing, but it wasn't in amusement - it was in utter mockery. The scenes depicted a woman interrogator, probably CIA from her civilian dress, trying to tie them with the planning of 9-11. When that failed, and the verification from the British constabulary in Tipton comes in, she tries to convince them to enter U. S. government service as interpreters for interrogations. The entire theater erupted in disbelieving laughter at that. I was reminded of Stockholm syndrome, where kidnappers hang onto their captives for so long that the victims begin to identify with and espouse the aims of their abductors. Newsreel clips, provided to the filmmakers courtesy of Al-Jazeera, of Bush and Rumsfeld similarly evoked laughter, particularly as those clips addressed the status of the Gitmo prisoners.
Yet in all of this, I was struck by the spareness of the portrayal. I expected a far more brutal, assaultive film, and this "Road to Guantanamo" is not. It seems rather restrained, in fact. It does evoke a sense of being trapped in a nightmare, similar to the 1980s film about an American jailed in Turkey for hashish smuggling, "Midnight Express". But that film almost had the quality of a phantasmagoria. This one does not - it has a feel of ultimate reality, very like the film "Kandahar", which portrays an Afghan woman exile's attempt to return home to bring out her trapped sister. "Kandahar" ends before that journey ends, and so it has an open-endedness that is really jarring, even frightening. Despite the bittersweet ending, "Road to Guantanamo" has a similar feeling of business left unfinished. How could it not, with the fate of Monir Ali still an open question, an open wound for his friends and family?
"Road to Guantanamo", particularly in the interrogation and attempted flipping scenes after the psychological torture sessions, reminded me of yet a third film, one far more recent: "V for Vendetta". In particular, I was struck by the resonance between the isolation and torture of the Tipton Three and of Evie, the young and unwilling subversive in "V", and the clarity of these characters' separate realization that they have absolutely no fear left at all. For the Tipton Three in "Road", it became clear that there was nothing left to fear, but that does not mean that they are not portrayed on their return as feeling disgust, betrayal, anger, and defiance. They had been broken psychologically, and they had nothing left to lose but life itself, and even that potential loss seemed like small change indeed.
I think this is a crucial film for everyone in the U. S. to see. I say that not just for its portrayal of a national shame, which is certainly an important reason to see it. I say that because we on DailyKos often, in our diaries and the discussions following, ask ourselves as Americans looking at our fellow citizens the difficult question "When is enough enough, when do we say `no more'?", and I think this film points out part of the futility of our asking that question when so much remains largely abstract to us. We need to face that we as a people have not yet been pushed far enough physically. Very little is actually in our faces -- yet. Whether this will happen or not is a good question, for I am uncertain as to whether this administration is in fact insane enough to take things to such extremes with its own citizens. While we, in this cyber-community, ARE fed up, HAVE had enough of the lies, the spin, the shame, the sense that the Bush administration's agenda is spiraling out of control at home and abroad, and while we cannot bend our consciences any further, we need to realize that we are not the majority of the country -- yet. That majority will have to see their friends, their families, neighbors, colleagues hauled off and mistreated before they will awaken, stand up and say "Enough!" Only then will they resist and push back against the slow erosion of our civil liberties. That, I think, is the relevance of "Road to Guantanamo" for Americans living in America, for it portrays average, ordinary working-class Brits from immigrant families finding themselves having to face the unthinkable, struggle against the unendurable, and then, upon winning their freedom, calmly, quietly, peacefully, tell the truth of their experience and bear witness to the world about the horror that engulfed them. Winterbottom and Whitecross make us like these young men, make them just like the young, high school educated American working stiffs who raise hell on their stag nights, just like our friends, brothers, cousins, husbands, sons. It shoves the impact of the Bush administration's policies right in our faces in starkly human terms. That is why this film is so important for Americans to see, for in it we see people much like us treated so very badly. That it is done with such calm, such restraint, and even, dare I say, such a lack of hate is all the more remarkable. Take your friends.