Award-Winning Guantanamo Doc Was Staged

To absolutely no one's surprise, Michael Winterbottom's "Road to Guantanamo" documentary picked up a Silver Bear award for Best Director at the recent Berlin Film Festival - with the award being shared by Winterbottom and co-director Mat Whitecross. Word also comes from Variety that the film is apparently a very hot commodity at the European Film Market.

More surprising is what we learned recently after reading a review of the film from Hollywood Reporter's reliably left-leaning Kirk Honeycutt. Apparently quite a lot of this explosive "documentary" was staged! Imagine that. Here's Honeycutt's review:

"A tough, compelling, must-see movie, 'The Road to Guantanamo' ... certainly exposes the Bush Administration's repeated assertions of their humane treatment of Islamic prisoners at extra-legal detention centers as a lie.

"The film mixes staged and archival footage with recreations of the interviews with the three surviving men. Annoyingly, film does come without a writing credit, presumably because interviews supplied the stories, but clearly someone structured the events."

Boy, that sure is annoying, Kirk! Maybe if the film featured a writing credit, people could actually press the writer to validate the claims made by the film. Honeycutt continues by telling the story of how the men got to Guantanamo, where they are "held in detention for over two years, systematically tortured and accused of all sorts of crimes."

He continues: "Working on a budget a little over $2 million, Winterbottom and Whitecross superbly recreate these experiences at locations in Britain, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran. There is little time for character or relationship development as events hit these young men fast. Similarly, the bullying American and British interrogators are all interchangeable.

"The film doesn't really plead a political cause or moral crusade as shown in persuasive dramatic terms what happened to these lads. It makes no attempt to enlarge the story beyond these men or to verify any of their claims. Continually, President Bush refers detainees at Guantanamo as 'bad people.' Clearly, these three were not."

We like Honeycutt's line stating that "Winterbottom and Whitecross superbly recreate these experiences at locations in Britain, Pakistan, Afghanistan and Iran." How does Honeycutt know this? Because the film's press kit tells him that? Or perhaps because Kirk was there, himself?

It's also comforting to read that the film "makes no attempt to enlarge the story beyond these men or to verify any of their claims." Now that's great documentary work! How come this didn't win for best film?

We're wondering what would happen if an openly conservative filmmaker did a documentary "recreating" Dick Cheney's hunting accident, and showed the film to the assembled world media at the Berlin Film Festival - without any writing credit. Why do we think such a filmmaker would be run out on a rail?