by MALCOLM FRASER

The recent inmate suicides at the world’s most popular extra-legal prison make The Road to Guantanamo extremely, depressingly topical. It’s the true story of Shafiq Rasul, Asif Iqbal and Ruhel Ahmed, three young British men of Pakistani descent who, in a stroke of truly bad timing, were visiting Afghanistan at the time of the U.S. invasion. Rounded up in a seemingly arbitrary mass arrest, they ended up doing two-and-a-half years of hard time, post-Geneva Convention style.

The film is a mix of documentary (interviews with the three men, news footage) and dramatic recreations of their ordeal. It’s directed by journeyman arthouse director Michael Winterbottom in collaboration with Mat Whitecross, and the division of labour is unclear, though Winterbottom has indicated in the press that Whitecross conducted the research and interviews.

Guantanamo is fast-paced and gets into the action without any delay. Our protagonists go to Pakistan for a wedding, and decide to visit Afghanistan to do some charity work. The next thing they know, they’re summarily gathered up and thrown into a U.S.-run jail, then flown off to “Gitmo” and subjected to the kind of humane treatment we so fondly recall from the Abu Ghraib photo sessions. Their eventual release is as random and unexplained as their arrest. The filmmakers seem to take the men’s version of events at face value, though there are a few vague spots in their story that might arouse suspicion among the sceptical.

Winterbottom’s slapdash, sometimes chaotic style has had mixed results in the past: it can deliver a joyful mess (24 Hour Party People, Tristram Shandy) or just a mess (9 Songs). In this case, it perfectly captures the absurdity of the story: a microcosm of the current global situation, where circumstances change without warning and no one has a grasp of the big picture, least of all the people supposedly in charge.

Guantanamo puts a human face on the Coalition of the Willing’s wholesale repeal of basic human rights. The interviews with the Tipton Three (so named by the British press after their hometown) are inspiring, even humbling. They describe their hellish experience with brutal honesty, but without bitterness and even with touches of humour. Their status as fully integrated members of “mainstream” society is driven home repeatedly, like when Rasul beat-boxes and freestyles in his Gitmo cage, or when Iqbal describes the prison’s infamous orange jumpsuits with a Back to the Future reference. Though this provides some much-needed levity, it skirts around the fact that the prisoners’ treatment is outrageous regardless of their background.

Politically, the film puts its cards on the table with brief clips of Bush, Blair and Rumsfeld blithely stating that the Gitmo detainees are all bad, bad people, besides which they’re being treated just fine. If you’re already horrified or infuriated at the excesses of the war on terror, this film will just make you more so. If you’re on the fence, The Road to Guantanamo is a darkly necessary wake-up call.

The Road to Guantanamo opens Friday, June 30

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