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Film review by Colin Fraser

ROAD TO GUANTANAMO
Road to Guantanamo
A dramatised documentary about the Tipton Three - four young lads in Pakistand for a wedding who visit Afghanistand on a whim. Unfortunately, their bus leads them straight to Guantanamo Bay instead. score

4
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1 (unwatchable) to 5 (unmissable)
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Cast
Riz Ahmed, Farhad Harun, Arfan Usman

Director
Michael Winterbottom

Screenwriter
Documentary

Country
UK

Rating / Running Time
MA / 95 minutes

Australian Release
November 2006

Official Site


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It is unlikely that you’ll see a more appalling film this year. The mercurial Michael Winterbottom (Tristram Shandy, Nine Songs) has turned his cameras on the plight of four British citizens caught up in the melee following 9/11. Referring to detainees at Cuba’s Guantanamo Bay, a resilient George W. Bush asserts that ‘these are bad people’. It sets the tone for what becomes theatre of the absurd. Winterbottom’s dramatised documentary starts some months prior when four English lads head to Pakistan for a wedding and take an ill-advised side-trip to Afghanistan. Poor timing found them arriving in Kandahar as coalition bombs start to fall and their plans are scuttled. Soon they’re funnelled into a Taliban stronghold and captured by the Northern Alliance when, suspected of being terrorists, they’re flown to Cuba and held without charge for over two years.

Unashamedly partisan, Road to Guantanamo is a story of conviction. Winterbottom cuts talking-heads and dramatic imaginings with riveting effect. As their misadventure quickly mires in the horrific reality of war, atrocities are brought into harsh relief. This is a one-sided account and Winterbottom isn’t shy of demonising coalition troops, or his own government’s horrendous efforts to hang a crime on innocent men. Emotional abuse and physical torture rain down while Donald Rumsfeld happily reminds us these conditions are ‘consistent with the Geneva Convention – for the most part’. As Road to Guantanamo tells the appalling, if shrill story of democracy unleashed, two ideas take hold: support for coalition governments is tacit support for the camps of Guantanamo Bay. Human spirit can triumph over evil. “It destroys you,” said one man, “or it makes you stronger”.

// COLIN FRASER