The Road to Guantanamo (Winterbottom/Whitecross, 2006)

[tavernier]

I'm looking forward to seeing this, even more so now that I've read these reviews. (Did they even see the same movie?)

J. Hoberman, Village Voice:

Asked about that triple suicide last week at Gitmo, Colleen Graffy, our deputy assistant secretary of state for public diplomacy, opined that it was a "good PR move." Michael Winterbottom's The Road to Guantánamo—which docu- dramatizes the case of the Tipton Three and won the Silver Bear at the last Berlin Film Festival—might be an even better one.

The great versatilist of British film, Winterbottom—here co-directing with editor Mat Whitecross—follows his hardcore structuralist musical 9 Songs and anti-adaptation of the anti-novel Tristram Shandy with the true story of three Tipton lads, British-born South Asians all around 20, who, caught in the wrong place at the wrong time, find themselves hooded and flown in a cargo plane to the U.S. prison camp on Guantánamo base.

"These are bad people," George W. Bush explains, with a touch of petulance and Tony Blair at his side, of the Guantánamo detainees. In the case of Ruhel Ahmed, Asif Iqbal, and Shafiq Rasul that term hardly applies—unless luckless and possibly stupid are synonymous with evil. Having gone to Pakistan in late 2001 for a wedding, the trio gravitate toward Afghanistan's open border and arrive at Kandahar in time for the bombing. They flee to Kabul and then, attempting to return to Pakistan, take a van that turns into a Taliban convoy.

The Tipton Three are represented as good Muslims, which is to say, they're not fundamentalists but citizens of the world—carrying Adidas tote bags, wearing Gap hoodies, and referencing Back to the Future. Arrested by American forces, they are initially unfazed. U.S.A. is OK. (Later, one will compose a rap song that captivates his American jailor until it gets too close to home.) But their interrogation degenerates into pointless brutalization—complete with menacing dogs—even before they are packed up and shipped to Gitmo.

The Road to Guantánamo is shot documentary-style, mainly on digital video, with much interpolated news footage and hectic Steadicam work. Interviews with the actual Tipton Three annotate the action, which is feverish to a fault before settling into its prison camp routine. From there on, it's effectively grueling. Less narrative than experiential in its bias, The Road to Guantánamo details the 24-7 "processing" of these prisoners, replete with beatings, stompings, sensory bombardment, cage-like cells, shackles, and endless, fruitless interrogations. What's brilliantly omitted by the filmmakers is the ostensible purpose of the violence. Although the Americans claim to want information, their intention is political. Rather than knowledge of Al Qaeda, the goal seems rather to force confessions useful in the creation of defendants for a future show trial.

Although the Tiptons are ultimately unbroken after two years in prison camp, The Road to Guantánamo is one of the most oppressive accounts of life in a military detention since Jonas Mekas's "documentary" version of The Brig or Peter Watkins's Punishment Park. How good is it as PR? (As the American guards are fond of saying, "Shut the fuck up!") By making a spectacle of the purposeless violence inflicted by frightened authority on whoever might be available, the movie could just as well have been called The Road to Haditha.

Armond White, New York Press:

The Taliban (remember them?) gets rehabilitated in The Road to Guantanamo, a pseudo-documentary by Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross, that contributes to the demonization of American foreign policy. Actors portray the British-Pakistani young men known as the Tipton Three who were illegally traveling in Afghanistan when the 9/11 terrorist attack took place. The Tipton Three were arrested by the Northern Alliance and imprisoned at Camp X-Ray in Guantanamo. (After being released they filed suit in the Supreme Court.) This whacked-out piece of anti-American propaganda, pretending Human Rights rhetoric, is a Weapon of Crass misInstruction. Using the Tipton Three's smugness to discredit the Bush administration, the film condemns the U.S. military for treating al-Qaeda suspects worse than the Taliban brutalized the Mideast.

It's all reality-TV-style fakery from the bogus talking heads interviews to the handheld digital camera “capturingâ€

[ellipsis7]

I caught it on Channel 4 - it's good and politically in the right place, but the sometimes uneasy mixture of drama and documentary still leaves some unanswered questions, clarification about what exactly the Tipton Three were up to in Afghanistan, which some critics picked up on... To what extent were they just 'three ordinary lads from Tipton', and total 'innocents abroad'... That said it's a scathing portrayal and timely portrait of the oppressive and illegal Guantanamo regime...

For me Antonia Bird's HAMBURG CELL (written by Ronan Bennett) about the 9/11 hijackers, also backed by C4, is a far better piece, as is Winterbottom's previous IN THIS WORLD, which used much of the same techniques as ROAD to better effect...

[colinr0380]

I caught it on Channel 4 - it's good and politically in the right place, but the sometimes uneasy mixture of drama and documentary still leaves some unanswered questions, clarification about what exactly the Tipton Three were up to in Afghanistan, which some critics picked up on...

Yes I remember the BBC Newsnight Review programme highlighting that issue with the film with one critic hating it and the other two liking it mostly because of the issue of which side the filmmaker was perceived to be on. I think the main point of discussion was that the critic who hated it really wanted much more interrogation into the Tipton Three's side of the story, while those that liked the film said that the film was concerned more with being a recreation of the Tipton Three's point of view, with the film recreating a confusing, frightening first-person perspective with the talking head footage adding some perspective on what they were feeling at the time (and showing the viewer the testimony on which I guess we are led to assume the filmmaker based the dramatisation). This does make the film biased in the sense that it shows no other point of view other than that of the three detainees, and there is no real overview of the situation or any chance for some of the people shown abusing prisoners to defend themselves or their actions, but I guess the point of view on that would be that for someone in that situation events would feel out of their control and they would not be told the reason why certain things were being done to them. Showing other points of view would probably soften the impact of the situation by removing the audience from the immediacy of the experience, and I suppose there is also the idea that the US case against the people in the camp has had ample chance to be put forward over the years, while this was one of the few first-hand accounts of inside Guantanamo Bay.

The critics who liked the film also emphasised that the handling of how the three came to be in Afghanistan did not seem to be hidden or glossed over and that it felt like the filmmakers were letting some of the attempts to explain ring hollow to leave the question of why they were there open to doubt (its been a while since I saw the film but I think the decision to cross the border to Afghanistan was said to be a spur of the moment decision), although it seems obvious to me that the film does strongly question the policy of rounding people up shipping them to another country and putting them in a prison camp without trial whatever the circumstances! I suppose it is just a question of watching with a skeptical mind aware of bias and weighing that up against other information to hand - I don't know about others but I find myself doing this with most things anyway!

I thought The Hamburg Cell was very good as well, and it is perhaps less controversial in that it maintains a classical dramatic distance from the people it shows - I wonder how it would work in a double bill with United 93 considering it takes the story up to to point of the hijackers getting on the plane.

Also, two of the 'Tipton Three' were detained at Luton Airport after coming back from the Berlin Film Festival to promote the film, which I think was an unfortunate but fitting ironic punchline to the whole situation!

[toiletduck!]

A more balanced, a less politicized review from Paul Arthur in Film Comment:

Cinematic realism embraces an abundance of styles and production methods; Michael Winterbottom seems determined to try them all. In a lightning 10-year run, he has explored gritty period adaptation (Jude), torn-from-the-headlines dramatic exposé (Welcome to Sarajevo), kitchen-sink minimalism (Wonderland), classical neorealist tearjerker featuring amateur performers navigating real-life locales (In This World), and a faux making-of documentary (Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story). His latest version of the volatile marriage between fiction and nonfiction, The Road to Guantanamo, alternates talking-head monologues by three ill-fated Pakistani guys from the British Midlands with ultra-convincing reenactments-starring raw players of similar background-of their horrific two-year incarceration in America's notorious prison camp for "enemy combatants" seized during the invasion of Afghanistan.

The story of the Tipton Three, a cause that generated considerable outrage in the U.K. but scarcely registered on our increasingly insular mediascape, opens like a slacker road movie: frat boys in the hinterlands, or Dumb and Dumber with skullcaps. Immediately after 9/11, Asif Iqbal (Arfan Usman) heads for rural Pakistan to check out the bride arranged by his mother. He convinces three friends to go with him and, hanging around in their homeland, they casually follow the injunction of a local mullah-at whose mosque they stay to "save money"-intent on aiding neighboring Afghans under attack by the U.S. Thus begins a trip to hell. Asif, Shafiq (Rizwan Ahmed), Ruhel (Farhad Harun), and Monir (Waqar Siddiqui) are shown as observant Muslims, twenty-something charmers completely detached from the religious and political fevers motivating, say, the London subway bombers. Indeed, despite a global tumult around 9/11 and the Blair regime's support for military intervention, we hear nary a word concerning their thoughts or reactions to cataclysmic events exploding around them.

Naive travelers to a fault, they lurch from one place to the next, get sick, get lost, leave a buddy behind, find themselves bivouacked with Taliban fighters in a dusty village, and are swept up by Northern Alliance forces. After a brief stopover for random abuse at an Afghan detention center, they are flown to Cuba. Winterbottom wraps up this wrenching journey in under 30 minutes, then spends the rest of the film presenting matter-of-fact oral testimony backed by excruciatingly detailed, visually overheated scenes of physical and psychological torture, interrupted only by moronic interrogation sessions. Like a cross between Punishment Park and Midnight Express, the pummeling endured by the victims is mirrored metaphorically in the film's jolting rhythms, quick cuts, and disorienting handheld movements. Shot in dv by resourceful cinematographer Marcel Zyskind, Guantanamo has the spontaneous look of eyewitness news footage hammered into blatantly fictional patterns of camera placement, editing, and so on. That is, while we can hardly doubt the veracity of what unfolds-it certainly comports with what we've seen and read of conditions at Gitmo-we also feel Winterbottom squeezing our vital organs of empathy in a stylistic vise. In one scene, Asif is chained to the floor in a stress position and assailed with a strobe light and heavy metal music, an image so culturally loaded it could have been lifted from the director's 24 Hour Party People or 9 Songs. As is true of Asif and company, the heavier the hand, the greater the potential for resistance.

If Winterbottom's primary aim was to personalize, to flesh out, as it were, an important episode in the ongoing barbarism of Bush administration foreign policy, he succeeds admirably: no longer can we relegate reports of prisoner abuse to a list of abstract numbers, faceless photos, or Orwellian parsings of the Geneva Conventions. That said, Winterbottom may have needlessly stacked his rhetorical deck. Documenting a reign of torture far worse than anything claimed thus far at Gitmo, Patricio Guzmán, in The Pinochet Case, concentrates on long-take close shots of survivors giving accounts of torture. Here the absence of archival footage or reenactments forces a deliberately uncomfortable bond with events that are essentially beyond adequate representation.

Winterbottom's hybrid mix of fact and drama is at once vaguely familiar and imbued with troubling ethical issues. At the heart of my misgivings is his dodging of any reference to the attitudes of the Tipton Three toward 9/11 or American responses to the attack. By implying that his recent immigrants are unequivocally apolitical, that their adventures in Afghanistan were the result of idle curiosity, Winterbottom does his theme a disservice. Needless to say, it shouldn't matter whether the subjects spent every waking minute in a public square screaming "Death to America" and for relaxation told anyone within earshot how many infidel throats they planned to slit. Assuming they weren't part of Osama's inner circle or had direct knowledge of an imminent terror attack, they deserved basic human rights supposedly guaranteed by our system of justice. By making the easiest case for injustice-touting three enormously appealing fellows who wouldn't know Osama from Barack Obama-Winterbottom sidesteps obligations associated with documentary filmmaking in favor of blazing agitprop.

Incidentally, after The Road to Guantanamo won a Silver Bear at this year's Berlin festival, the three friends and assorted cast members were questioned by police at a London airport upon their return. One of the actors said he was denied access to a lawyer and was badgered about future roles in "political" films. You can't make stuff like this up.

© 2006 by Paul Arthur

-Toilet Dcuk

[bkimball]

I was able to see this film on Saturday and my what film it is.

After reading some reviews to see where others stood on it, I've come to the conclusion that many are missing the point of the film. Yes, they didn't focus on the validity of why the young men went Afghanistan. Yes, the movie didn't talk about true enemies against the US. It's main focus was that the US is hypocritcal for using this "leaders of the free world vs. evildoer" modus operandi in war.

The facts are all there: they weren't given access to lawyers, they were assumed guilty before proven innocent, and they were tortured until (one of the best parts of the movie) they admitted to being "fighters" just so the pain would stop.

This was all beautifully topped with the fact that over 750 people have been sent there in connections with terrorist activities. Over 500 still remain there, and only 10 have ever been found guilty. 10!

The US government's intelligence is shown to be quite laughable (literally - laughter in the theater after the moronic and inept way the military treated the prisoners), and quite ironic (well placed clips of news interviews of Bush and Rumsfeld come to mind).

If the US wants to fight terrorism, the government might want to look inwards to even think of making a signifcant change.

See this movie.

[BrightEyes23]

Got my R2 copy of this last week and gave it a watch...

Wow...what an interesting film. I guess there wasn't really anything in it that I hadn't known before from keeping up with the press about Gitmo, but it was VERY effective.

I agree with bkimball's assesment of what Winterbottom was trying to achieve, the idea that the U.S.' actions involving Gitmo are going against everything this country has traditionally stood for, and just as the Supreme Court decided, they are illegal.

As for why the trio entered Afghanistan, I thought it was because they wanted to see what was going on, and possibly help out with the aid workers, I could've swore they said something about that.

The matter of fact though is that the reason they WERE sent to Gitmo was because they were British citizens.

And yes the US' attempt at "intelligence" in Gitmo are a farce. Just last week the story came out that a detainee was brought in front of a tribunal and told he had one chance to prove his innocence. He named (i believe it was) 3 individuals that could vouch for his non-involvement with Al Qaeda, the US told him they spent 3 weeks searching for these individuals and couldnt find them, he was lying. The Guardian in the UK took 3 DAYS to find the individuals and verify the detainees story.