The Road to Guantanamo, made by the prolific and eclectic British filmmaker Michael Winterbottom is part documentary, part dramatic reconstruction. It is based on the real-life story of the so-called “Tipton Three”—British young men who had been held at Guantanamo Bay for more than two years, before eventually being released to Britain.
The three had gone to Pakistan for a wedding. There, they responded to an Imam’s call for humanitarian aid in Afghanistan, and so off they went—almost on a lark. But when American planes attacked, they were caught in the panicked flight of people from the new war zone. They could not find their way back to Pakistan, were taken into custody and eventually ended up in Guantanamo. A fourth friend disappeared in Afghanistan during the bombing and hasn’t been found or heard from.
Their capture is a Kafkaesque nightmare. No one believes their insistence that they are not terrorists or fighters. They are beaten and tortured. In a scene fraught with ridicule, an investigator demands to know, “Where is Osama bin Laden?” A female investigator shows them video footage of an old rally where Mohammad Atta and bin Laden are present. The video is of terrible quality,—we really can’t see much more than snow—but the interrogator insists that the three are sitting in the crowd. The abuse of the Koran, the extreme cold temperatures, and the loud and disruptive rock music are some of the “softening” techniques which have been reported and which the Tipton Three are subjected to.
Ironically, they are eventually cleared because two of them were in trouble. They were on parole and the third was working in an electrical superstore during the time they were supposedly in Pakistan with bin Laden. If that documentation did not, by chance exist, they might well still be there.
What is best about Michael Winterbottom’s film is that he tells the story dispassionately, at a distance, without editorializing, letting the Tipton Three and their ordeal speak for themselves.
But even here, The Road to Guantanamo is somehow “dangerous” for those who defend institutions like Camp X-Ray and Camp Delta at Guantanamo with patriotic slogans and exhortations of the alleged “killers” housed there. In The Road to Guantanamo, Michael Winterbottom puts a human face on what until now has remained faceless: an abstract concept. It’s something we haven’t been allowed to see, because this camp and its inmates, like so many camps and prisons of the recent and more distant past, is something restricted and hidden from our view.
An example of the obscene times we live is how some feel the need to keep these images away from our consciousness rests in the flap with the MPAA over the film’s poster.
When the film poster for Michael Winterbottom’s film The Road to Guantanamo was submitted to the Motion Picture Association of America as a part of the rating process, it was immediately rejected. The image on the poster showed a man hanging by his handcuffed wrists, with a burlap sack over his head. A blindfold is tied around the hood with an i.d. label attached. Howard Cohen, co-president of the North American distribution company Roadside Attractions said, “The reason given was that the burlap bag over the guy’s head was depicting torture, which wasn’t appropriate for children to see.”
The poster for the film’s opening has been changed to show only a pair of shackled hands and arms.
American filmmaker Kirby Dick who has been working on a documentary about the American film ratings system called This Film Is Not Yet Rated, which will be released this fall, saw irony in the MPAA’s censoring an image of “someone whose image is being blocked…that’s the image they’re blocking. When you get into censorship, the irony never stops.”
Moreover posters for horror films which sometimes have violent images like images of blood, gore or decapitation have been allowed by the MPAA.
The case of the Tipton Three is also not over. A U.S. District Court judge ruled in May that the three have the right to file a lawsuit against their U.S. captors in Guantanamo Bay. American lawyers plan to file a suit against Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and ten U.S. military commanders on their behalf.
This is Milos Stehlik for Chicago Public Radio’s Worldview.
Worldview film contributor Milos Stehlik is the director of Facets Multimedia.
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