The Road to Guantanamo (2006)

Directed by: Michael Winterbottom, Mat Whitecross | 95 minutes | drama, documentary | Actors: Riz Ahmed, Ewan Bailey, Steven Beckingham, Farhad Harun, Nancy Crane, Waqar Siddiqui, Arfan Usman, Shahid Iqbal, Sher Kan, Jason Salkey

‘The Road to Guantánamo’ has already caused quite a stir. The fact that three innocent civilians spent two years in a US prison without trial is shocking to many people. In particular, the conditions under which the British were detained have a lot of impact. The trouble started when an unsuspecting young man from England traveled to Pakistan.

At the end of September 2001, Asif Iqbal (Arfan Usman) from Tipton, England, travels to Pakistan to meet the bride his mother has found for him. On the spot, the wedding preparations are made and Asif enthusiastically calls his friends Ruhel (Farhad Harun), Shafiq (Riz Ahmed) and Monir in Tipton. Whether they come to celebrate the party with him. The friends travel after him and they meet in Karachi. There they visit a mosque with a cousin of Shafiq. The imam calls on the audience to help their comrades in Afghanistan in their fight against the American danger. And that’s where it goes wrong.

In their hunger for adventure, the British take the first bus to the border and travel further into Afghanistan by truck. This country is now under heavy American fire. Asif falls seriously ill and the friends soon regret their decision to ‘help’ the Afghans. They try to return to Pakistan but are pushed further and further into the war zone by a bus driver with other plans. In the chaos of the attacks, the boys lose sight of Monir. They never see him again.

Eventually, the three are arrested in the company of Taliban fighters and end up in Guantánamo Bay. It slowly dawns on them that this American POW camp is not a way station. Asif puts this aptly; “As an Englishman, you think Americans are okay.” The persistence with which their interrogators continue to believe that the men are members of Al Qaeda is remarkable. That they were suspicious in the given circumstances is up to that point, but then laws and human rights are violated in a frighteningly easy way. Legal procedures are not followed and torture is the rule rather than the exception.

Winterbottom gives the tragedy cool but penetrating form. He lards dramatized images with fragments from interviews with the victims and the news. The news fragments are in such a contrast to the story of the three friends that the message comes across loud and clear: something is not right here. Bush, for example, says in an interview that there are “only bad people” in Guantanamo Bay.

It seems that Asif, Ruhel and Shafiq are resigned to the whole situation. They show little emotion and therefore it is sometimes difficult to identify with them. In fact, this applies to all characters and a positive aspect of this is that the story is not overly colored. It even gives the film a universal twist. The roles of the ‘good and the bad guys’ are interchangeable and you can fill in the names of countries and people, depending on the moment in history. Winterbottom also explicitly does not call his work anti-American. All this makes ‘The Road to Guantánamo’ not only an indictment, but even more an all-time drama.