Brutal But Cool Take On Terror

Newcastle Herald

Wednesday May 9, 2007

By JIM SCHEMBRI - The Age

REVIEW

THE ROAD TO GUANTANAMO (MA)

Directors: Michael Winterbottom, Mat Whitecross

Screening: Newcastle Showcase City Cinemas at 8.15pm Sunday as part of the Sydney Travelling Film Festival

Rating: * * *

DESPITE its extremely well-sculpted air of agitprop immediacy there is no grand, over-arching political statement at the heart of the docu-drama The Road to Guantanamo.

Unless, of course, that message is that if Muslim terrorists from the Middle East start World War III by flying hijacked airliners into New York skyscrapers, don't then catch the next flight to the Middle East, especially if you are Muslim. It could be trouble otherwise.

Trouble is certainly what greeted four young and arguably dim British Muslims who trekked to Pakistan to take part in a wedding immediately after the atrocities of September 11.

Directors Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross intercut lengthy interviews with three of the real-life participants Asif Iqbal, Shafiq Rasul and Ruhel Ahmed with some vivid re-creations of their harrowing journey.

Employing news footage and hand-held film techniques that effectively recreate the urgency and texture of on-the-fly documentary making, the directors track the increasingly perilous sojourn of these friends that leads them into the anxious, angry, suspicious arms of the US military.

After some none-too-subtle introductions to the art of modern interrogation, the men, barely out of their teens, are booked into the now-infamous holding facility at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.

There is brutality and torture in The Road to Guantanamo, and there is no denying the impact these scenes have given: that the perpetrators are supposed to be the good guys in the mislabelled "war on terror".

There is also the temptation to impose on the film one's own political views and interpret the movie as anti-war, anti-American, anti-Bush. But, thankfully, the directors bring a coolness to the heat.

It was the cover of normality and the presumption of common decency that the 9/11 terrorists took advantage of to execute their mission.

It is against the military's hardened presumption of guilt that the prisoners have to fight.

It's these moments in The Road to Guantanamo that the "war on terror" is reduced to its most human, and awful, essence, as the conviction that somebody is guilty does battle with the knowledge that one is innocent. The Age

© 2007 Newcastle Herald

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