Stitch up in the war on terror

The Road to Guantánamo mixes documentary and fictional footage.
10 April 2012
The Road to Guantánamo
Berlin Festival

Those who suspect that films that seamlessly mix documentary and fictional footage are likely to be cheating may find Michael Winterbottom and Matt Whitecross's movie, about the three British Pakistanis captured in Afghanistan and packed off for more than two years to Guantánamo, a difficult one to assess.

Their story about the Tipton Three includes interviews with the men themselves, documentary footage of the period just before and during the Afghan war and a dramatised account of their travels, capture, interrogation and incarceration, in which actors are used.

It is a highly polemical piece, suggesting that not only were they innocent of any thoughts of terrorism but that, even if they had been guilty, the treatment accorded to them made a mockery of Donald Rumsfeld's statement that the Geneva Convention was being followed "more or less".

The four young friends (one of them disappeared before they were captured in Afghanistan and was never found again) set off from Tipton in the Midlands, apparently for a wedding and a holiday in Pakistan in September 2001.

Their journey took them from Karachi to Afghanistan, where they were captured by Northern Alliance forces, handed over to the Americans and flown first to Camp X-Ray and then to Camp Delta in Cuba.

They were accused of being international terrorists and released only when it was finally proved that one of them had been working in Curry's at the time supposed footage of them in Afghanistan had been shot, and the other two had been on parole in Tipton.

The film assumes their complete innocence, but in doing so begs one or two awkward questions. We never learn exactly why they left Karachi for Afghanistan, though one of them says they went "to help", whatever that means.

And we only learn very late in the film that they had criminal records and were thus more likely to be suspected. The interviews with them seem to leave a fair bit out.

On the credit side, the film is excellently shot and stitches together documentary and fiction in masterly fashion. It surely has a right to its version of the truth. But it should also have made sure that it was as fair as possible to both sides of a difficult and tendentious argument. And it isn't quite that.

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