Jornal da Mostra
The Road to Guantanamo
Nº 399 > 29ª Mostra > 17/02/2006
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Leon Cakoff, de Berlim, para o ‘Jornal da Mostra’
Edição:
Renata de Almeida e Leon Cakoff
Edição:
Renata de Almeida e Leon Cakoff
Winterbottom makes an astonishing documentary-drama on the Guantanamo nightmare
This is a real story, of intense terror, with the overall effect, for viewers, of being dealt a series of blows in the stomach. "The Road to Guantanamo", by Michael Winterbottom, co-directed by Mat Whitecross, is a re-make with real images, interviews, and reconstitutions, of a journey into living hell for four English youngsters of Pakistani origin. The satires and attacks to the Bush regime by U.S. documentarist Michael Moore seem mere child`s play in face of the impact of the new film by versatile English director Michael Winterbottom (he was awarded a Golden Bear in Berlin 2004 for "In this World/ Neste Mundo").Contrary, however, to Michael Moore`s project that made his ironic tirades into big business (over US0 million in the U.S. alone), Winterbottom raised waves of controversy at the 56th Berlin Film Festival, where his film is again outstanding in competition, when he announced he intends to launch "Road to Guantanamo" worldwide, released concomitantly in cinemas and for distribution on DVD and the internet. The controversy comes from effective marketing, and whether this move will draw more spectators to cinemas, as all films would prefer.
In September, 2001, Asif Iqbal`s Pakistani mother returns to Tripton in England with the news that she has arranged for a bride for her son in a village close to Faisalabad, in Pakistan. Asif sets out some days later to meet his promised bride and, as he will need witnesses, he asks his friends Ruhel Ahmed, Shafiq Rasul, and Monir to go along with him. On the way, the boys are fascinated by mosques that offer free lodging to travellers. In one of them, in Karachi, they are persuaded by an imam to pay a visit to Afghanistan in a humanitarian gesture to aid people who are about to be bombed and invaded by troops allied to the United States.
The route for the odyssey is based on personal reports and was really lived by Asif, Ruhel, and Shafiq. Monir disappears in Kandahar where the friends ultimately arrive, on the same night in which the attacks to the Taliban begin, as retaliation to the terrorist September 11 attacks in the U.S.
Bush, his secretary Rumsfeld, and Blair, make an appearance discoursing with characteristic cynicism on human rights and the Geneva convention. The images seen on film cause the audience to laugh in derision. After three years of torture and confinement in the Cuban bay of Guantanamo, the three Anglo-Pakistani deponents enter into details of their day-to-day routine, up to this time unknown. There are reports of unceasing physical and psychological torture; reports of premeditated murder by asphyxia in closed trucks, with total contempt for human life; regulated and continuous humiliation - mechanical, with sadistic military methodology in incidents that our imagination can associate only with the era of Nazi army domination.
Nobody will come out from the U.S. or from the U.K. to say that the film is a farse or blasphemy against western values - the platform for paranoic defense on the part of the U.S. against barbarous moslems. Signs of the crimes of allied western troops are obvious added-accusations in films such as those of Winterbottom. More photographs have been published, even more sadistic and shameful than the former, of torture to prisoners in Irak. The only difference between the real photos of prisons in Irak and the film, "The Road to Guantanamo", is of moving images in an impeccable reconstitution of this terrible plot with the vertigo of an uncontrollable plunge into living hell.
Apart from the emotion, we must focus on the point of interest suggested in this masterpiece - a type of film little experimented and daring in cinema - a documentary-drama - a creative and practical blend of images from the archives, with reconstitution of what is real in the form of a documentary. For, after all, why the hell were four English youngsters - first generation children of Pakistani immigrants on the eve of an announced invasion, in that part of the world, anyway? And what humanitarian sympathy can possibly be aroused by the Taliban who dispute the world podium of disrespect for women`s rights and for human rights in general?
Anthropology and sociology provide saddening answers to this: every asphixiated, repressed, intolerable culture offers resistance in its afterlife through conservative, reactionary, radicalism to change. That is why the Indians from the Amazon and the shiites of Kandahar take refuge in their culture of resistance. Only this explains the need for a Pakistani mother to go and fetch a bride for her English son in a remote village in Pakistan, but still does not explain how four English youngsters with all of the habits of English suburbia, take this innocent step backwards to their origins.
Winterbottom`s biography is surprising for its polyvalence. The good aspect is that this is the best example of cinema, experimenting to find equilibrium in maturity. In "The Road to Guantanamo", there is no sentimental blackmail, no insinuation or cliché of worse perversity, as, for instance, of sexual acts that were committed and reported but were left out of the film. What is in evidence in "Road to Guantanamo" is human dignity and, mainly, injustice practiced hypocritically and blindly in the name of democratic freedom. The Guantanamo prisoners are blind-folded for almost all of the time in this crossing through prison infernos from Afghanistan to Cuba.
And what happens to these Anglo-Pakistani youngsters in the course of the Kafkian process? They immerse themselves further and further into the fundamentals of the Koran and religious orthodoxy, when they were no more than young naïve suburbanites privileged by the surrounding multicultural minds of England. The film comes to an end leaving a distinct impression that the eyes blindfold are of the allied troops who, much to the satisfaction of the armaments industry, follow a prescription of intolerance and vicious cycles of violence, to the letter. After all, to whom is this of any interest, and who takes advantage of radicals?
Translation into English: Clare Elizabeth Charity ( clarecharity@uol.com.br )
