A FEW BAD APPLES
Alex Gibney’s father was a U.S. naval interrogator with experiences of Japanese prisoners during World War II. He and his fellow men learned that torture was an ineffective means of withdrawing information from enemy prisoners. Before his death, he begged his son to make a film about the U.S.’s use of torture on untried prisoners and, by definition, its disregard for the rules of democracy in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. So Alex Gibney made that film, and this year, after his last project Enron: The Smartest Guys In The Room was nominated for an Academy Award in 2005, the film won Best Documentary at The Oscars.
Taxi To The Darkside is a film about the systematic attempts made by the Bush administration to sidestep the laws laid down in the Geneva Convention to safeguard against the maltreatment of war prisoners. At its most essential, it’s an exposé of their hypocrisy in the loosely defined war on terror. What exactly is terror, though? Many things, of course, among them the demolition of commercial buildings in a foreign country, but equally the imprisonment of an innocent civilian, removed from the taxi he worked hard to acquire and thrust into a hostile prison complex where he is beaten, abused, stripped naked, deprived of sleep, chained to the ceiling and generally tortured until his body can take no more and he dies. That someone was a young Afghan civilian named Diliwar, and it’s his story that provides the framework for Gibney’s work.
From the Bagram facility in Afghanistan where young Diliwar was held through the Abu Ghraib prison outside Baghdad from where those famous leaked photos of prisoners abused emerged, to Guantanamo and Washington D.C., it’s a deeply disturbing look into the military's use of torture on prisoners of war, sanctioned, the film reveals, by those at the very top: Rumsfeld, Cheney, Bush. A ‘few bad apples’ was the somewhat flippant explanation they gave for the atrocities in Abu Ghraib, but that doesn’t stand up once you’ve seen the film. And you should, if only to fully understand quite what's been going on.
I shan’t go into the politics of it right here because the film takes care of all that and more. Suffice to say I left the first Film Knights event last night feeling like I finally understood the sheer gravity of it all. We wanted Gibney to introduce the film, but he proved impossible to track down. He must have quite a story. What does it take to create a film like this exactly? Courage, surely, but also faith, and lots of it:
“All I had was faith. You have to go in with a sense of faith that you’ll find something, and you keep digging and digging and digging until you get it.”
No doubt his father would be proud.
Taxi To The Dark Side is officially released in the UK on May 30th, 2008.
