WINTERBOTTOM DEFENDS FILM ON TRIO’S GUANTANAMO ORDEAL

LUKE HARDING in Berlin
The Guardian, 2/15/06

The British director Michael Winterbottom yesterday defended his latest controversial film The Road to Guantánamo when it opened at the Berlin film festival. The movie, which tells the story of three Britons who travel to Pakistan for a wedding and end up in Guantánamo Bay, was last night hotly tipped to win the festival's coveted Golden Bear award.

It graphically depicts the ordeal endured by Rhuhel Ahmed, Asif Iqbal and Shafiq Rasul, all from Tipton in the West Midlands, two of whom were at yesterday's screening. The three were captured in northern Afghanistan in 2001 and handed over to the US military. Actors play American soldiers who punch the men, abuse them during interrogations, and ask them repeatedly whether they knew Osama bin Laden "personally."

Yesterday Winterbottom insisted he had not set out to demonise US soldiers. "We were not trying to portray Americans badly. We were simply trying to show what happened," he said.

Flanked by two of the Tipton three - Shafiq Rasul and Rhuhel Ahmed - he added: "If people had said five years ago that the US was going to create a prison in Cuba, of all places, and keep people there for four years without any trial or charge, people would have thought you were crazy. We tell the story of three men who have been caught up in this incredible and perverse system."

The film is part documentary and part fictional reconstruction interspersed with interviews with the Tipton three. Yesterday Shafiq Rasul and Rhuhel Ahmed said that it was time for Guantánamo to be closed. "We want everybody to be released from there. We want the place to be closed. It's against human rights, basically," Mr Rasul said. The men said they had been treated better in Guantánamo than other Arab prisoners.

They also said they had been disappointed by the response from Britain's Muslim community after they were released without charge in 2004. "They didn't want anything to do with us," Mr Ahmed said. Spending more than two years in Guantánamo had made them more religious, they added.

"If it wasn't for our religion we would not have been able to get through it," Mr Rasul said. "Islam teaches us to be patient. We were patient."

Yesterday Winterbottom said that he didn't know whether his political 90-minute film would find a distributor in the United States. He also said that he didn't know what Tony Blair - who appears in clips taken from a contemporary news report - would think. "I don't really care, to be honest," he said.

The film was shot over six months last year, with Winterbottom's grimly authentic version of Guantánamo Bay filmed in Tehran.

Channel 4 will show The Road to Guantánamo on March 9.

To read the Variety review of "The Road to Guantanamo," click here.

For more Moviecrazed coverage of the Berlin Festival, click here.