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Title: The Road to Guantanamo
Year: 2006
Director: Michael Winterbottom, Mat Whitecross
Leads: Riz Ahmed, Farhad Harun, Waqar Siddiqui, Afran Usman
Language: English/Urdu
Run Time: 95 min.
Directed by Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross, The Road to Guantanamo, which premiered at the Berlin Film Festival, is a movie about a group of British Muslims who get caught up with fighters in Afghanistan and end up at Camp X-Ray. The story of Shafiq Rasul, Ruhel Ahmed, Asif Iqbal, and Munir Ali and their journey is portrayed without being romanticized or patronized. Their reenacted personal narratives are interlinked with news reports, subtly highlighting the degree to which reporters are removed from the human dimension of world events. The actors are excellent: earthy and natural in front of the camera. But, since the directors set out to depict the confusing circumstances in which the young men find themselves, one can also become confused about which event is meant to have happened to whom. Sometimes it seems that there are seven people telling the story instead of three.
Visiting Pakistan is an adventure to the four friends; they eat out at cafes, visit fun fairs, and Shafiq goes to visit his extended family. Tension in the streets is building as the US is planning raids in Afghanistan. Preachers exhort crowds to go help the people of Afghanistan, fearing the chaos that will ensue if the US goes in. The youths say that they decided to go to Afghanistan "to help." At the time, they were not very serious about their religion, and they are depicted as fairly average, secular young British men; this raises the question why some fairly average, secular young men would risk going to a country that is about to be bombed by the US. Winterbottom and Whitecross show how the four friends get caught up in events — perhaps they also got caught up in the emotion, and perhaps they were also curious.
On the way to Afghanistan, their bus driver inexplicably disappears. They find another bus and travel through austere, mountainous landscape to Quetta. Here, the landscape and atmosphere of Pakistan and Afghanistan are captured beautifully, but confusion arises again for the viewer once the youths are over the border. Traveling from place to place involves climbing onto crowded pickup trucks, and often it seems that one of them is about to get left behind.
The friends arrive in Kandahar, a Taliban stronghold, and that night the bombing raids begin. They move on to Kabul, where they stay for a few weeks while Shafiq is seriously ill. Then they hear news that there is bombing in the north of Kabul. At that time, they decide to head back to Pakistan, but by then hundreds of other people are also heading for the border, fleeing the oncoming US-backed Northern Alliance. They get taken to Kunduz, where they hear stories of General Dostum, who allegedly cut off a man's fingers one by one and pulled another apart with two tanks.
Then the US breaks into Kunduz and there is panic, more people running for trucks. Munir is lost forever. They sleep for one night out in the open, but the bombing raids force them to run. The next day, bodies are everywhere: "Everyone was screaming. Legs blown off, stomachs coming out, arms hanging off. When someone is in agony and you can't help them, that affects you," says Asif.
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The Northern Alliance and US forces round up the foreign fighters, the Taliban and the young men. All the men are searched. In the distance, mass graves are being dug, with injured but conscious people being thrown in. One wonders whether one of those people might not have been Munir. While Shafiq and Ruhel are transported to Mazar-e-Sharif in a canvas-topped truck, Asif is taken in a metal container packed with other men. They rapidly begin to run short of air. He falls unconscious. When he awakens, he finds himself lying among a pile of corpses. He meets up with Shafiq and Ruhel and they are taken to Shebergan prison, where they go for days with no food or water until the Red Cross arrives. Then all the men are brought for questioning before a US officer, to whom they have to answer while kneeling.
After that, the madness really begins. What we witness is a dehumanized system in the business of dehumanizing others. Its spiritual and intellectual aridity is striking. The behavior of the US army reveals a nation with a severely unbalanced psychology. Nevertheless, it seems that the directors have spared the viewer the more lurid and grotesque details of "interrogation methods" at Guantanamo. We see the now notorious Rapid Reaction Force beating up a deranged inmate; the strenuous positions in which the young men are tied for hours while being subjected to thrash metal and strobe lights; the exposure to pornographic magazines. But the mental strain of being detained without trial is not conveyed in the depth that it might have been.
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| British director Winterbottom and the cast pose to present the Road to Guantanamo (Reuters). |
Winterbottom and Whitecross do give us a taste of the bizarre and illogical questioning techniques employed by the US army. When the youths are transferred to Camp Delta, the same questions are put to them for more than a year and include sessions with a female officer who holds up a grainy photo of a group with Osama bin Laden. She points to a blurry face in the crowd and says again and again, "That's you, isn't it?" no matter how obvious it is not. It is frightening to think that the US army cannot tell the difference between one person and another and is willing to apply medieval measures against detainees based upon grainy photographs.
At the end, the three young men assess their experience. All in all, it has only driven them toward their religion. The film ends with them visiting Pakistan again, this time as serious and reflective people. They attend Asif's wedding in Pakistan. Yet it is an Asif who rarely smiles, who, even on his wedding night, looks troubled.
It is important that this film was made, in order to humanize those on the receiving end of the US mission to shape the world in its image. Reviews show that liberal-minded critics have been duly shocked; yet we know that what is depicted is just the tip of the iceberg. It took a non-Muslim to produce this film. Muslim organizations need to follow their example and fund other such films since cinema is one of the best mediums for conveying the Muslim worldview to a non-Muslim audience.
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