The Reeler’s Thursday night rounds began at IFC Center, where director Michael Winterbottom stopped by after a preview screening of his new docudrama The Road to Guantánamo (opening today in New York). Presented by the American Civil Liberties Union, the invitation-only event brought in attendees from New York’s legal and human-rights-advocacy communities; the evening culminated in a panel discussion featuring Winterbottom, a trio of lawyers and, via iChat from Great Britain, the trio of young men (a k a the “Tipton Three”) whose Guantánamo incarceration ordeal inspired the film.

Two-thirds of The Road to Guantánamo‘s Tipton Three–Shafiq Rasul and Ruhel Ahmed (Asif Iqbal was en route)–join IFC Center panelists (L-R) Gitanjali Gutierrez, Steven Watt, Michael Winterbottom and Anthony Romero live from England (Photo: STV)
Short of recounting the basic plot (four British Muslims travel to Pakistan for a wedding, then go to Afghanistan for some reason immediately after 9/11; one goes missing while the other three are rounded up and shipped to Guantánamo for interrogation and torture at the hands of American oppressors; they are released without charges two-and-a-half years later), I do not have a lot else to say about Winterbottom’s film that has not been articulated already by critics Stuart Klawans and David Edelstein. In a nutshell, Winterbottom takes his subjects’ stories at face value, placing viewers in the odd position of keeping one eye on their bullshit meters and one eye on the heinous abuses onscreen. The director consciously plays with facts–not revealing a character’s criminal past until he needs it as an alibi, for example, or not daring to ask what breach in common sense compelled the men to visit Afghanistan on the eve of American bombing–while meticulously assembling interviews, re-enactments and news footage that outline a severe case against the conditions of his subjects’ detention.
I mean, obviously, yeah–torture and detention without due process are indisputably wrong. But I am equally certain that the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan was the only defensible American military campaign of my lifetime. Call the intervening nuance what you will: blaming the victim, healthy skepticism, fence-straddling, etc. All I know is that Winterbottom trades context and narrative for excess and stridency, and his film is the worse for it.
So anyway, there were Winterbottom and the Tipton Three–Asif Iqbel, Shafiq Rasul and Ruhel Ahmed–joined by the ACLU’s Anthony Romero and Steven Watt and the Center for Constitutional Rights‘ Gitanjali Gutierrez. Regrettably, between the roomy echo and their thick British accents, I could hardly make out any of the young men’s comments. But between extended bits of his fellow panelists’ preening, lawerly self-congratulation, Winterbottom squeezed in a few details about Guantánamo’s impact since its acclaimed debut last February at the Berlin Film Festival.
“To be honest,” Winterbottom said, “for most of the screenings abroad, Ruhel, Shafiq and Asif have been there and I haven’t. But when we showed it it Berlin, I think up to that point none of them had their pictures in the papers and none of them had talked to journalists very much. And it was a huge cinema, and when they came up on stage, there was a massive standing ovation. For me as a director, it was the most moving moment or event of my professional career. For these people who had been through all the stuff they had been through, to see them finally get some kind of support from people was brilliant. So I hope from that point, they realize how powerful their statement has been for people watching the film.
“In a way, what attracted me to making the film is that it has a happy ending,” he continued. “Asif gets married finally, Shafiq gets married, Ruhel’s married. It’s like, despite everything that’s happened, they get on with their lives. But for 460 other people, they’re still there. And that’s the idea of making the film: to remind you that there are 460 other indivdual stories that all could be made into films.”

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