The Road to Guantánamo

last updated 8 January 2015

Director Michael Winterbottom has chosen to use both real interviews and actors' re-enactments to tell this story of three Muslim innocents, said Carina Chocano in the Los Angeles Times. While his method is often questionable, this film 'œprovides a riveting glimpse into a heavily shrouded political and moral quagmire that deepens by the day.' Four young Muslim British citizens travel to Pakistan in October 2001, where they are inspired by an imam who urges them to 'œhelp' Afghanistan. The boys set off for Kandahar, but they are captured in a Northern Alliance raid and shipped off to GuantÃ¡namo. Their treatment in prison is horrifying, sometimes even nauseating, said David Denby in The New Yorker, but how much of this story should we actually believe? It's hard to understand why these kids would travel to Afghanistan on a whim, especially when we know that they have criminal records back home. 'œIs this a case of spectacularly rotten timing, or is something being kept from us?' It's possible, even probable, that we're not being told the whole story here, said Dana Stevens in Slate.com. But that doesn't mean the scenes of abuse at the hands of the Americans aren't revealing of military wrongdoing. 'œThe burden of proof hardly rests on Michael Winterbottom.' We wouldn't need a movie like this one if our government had taken responsibility for GuantÃ¡namo in the first place.

Rating: R