Recently in Politics Category
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.
Safe to say Barack owes writer Juse One a drink or two.
Were he alive, you could bet your life that Ryszard Kapuściński would be in the thick of the current unrest in Kenya after Mwai Kibaki was officially re-elected last week amidst claims of fraud from opposition leader Raila Odinga. News surfaced yesterday of 30 people burned to death in a church they hoped might provide them with shelter. Some 300 or so are confirmed dead in total, and that number continues to rise. This is the bad side of Africa, the volatility, the clan mentality, the violence; and all this in one of the continent’s most stable countries. As Desmond Tutu said today, “”This is a country that has been held up as a model of stability.” No longer.
Kapuściński thrived in such situations. A Polish war correspondent responsible for some 50 countries during the 60s and 70s, a period during which, one by one, African countries gained their independence, he covered wars and political and social situations in Africa (and other parts of the world, too), but he did it in such a way that, far from keeping us away, in fact pulled readers closer and closer to Africa. He understood its nuances, its differences, its cultures, its tribes, its climate, its people. And he loved them all.
So what? Well, I mention Kapuściński for three reasons. Firstly, because we’re approaching the first anniversary of his death this month. Secondly, because of what’s happening in Kenya as I write. And thirdly, because I returned from Kenya only four days ago, and while out there I read The Shadow of the Sun, Kapuściński’s 2001 chronicle of his experiences across the continent since the end of colonialism. It’s one of the most moving and heartfelt books I’ve read in a long, long time and remarkable in many ways, not least in the risks he took to be at the heart of some pretty dangerous situations. Getting into Zanzibar a day after the revolution of 1964 kicked off was one thing (he was the first journalist to get into the country - no one else was allowed in and anyone who tried had their transportation shot at), but getting out a week later to cover the sudden revolts in Uganda, Kenya and Tanganyika was quite another. Nobody was allowed to leave the island at the time. He and a handful of journalists who’d eventually found a way onto the island now needed a way out. An old man offered to sell them a small motorboat. They would leave at night, so as to avoid the sight of gunmen littered around the coast, and they’d head for the African mainland - 70 kilometres or so. Together they set off, creeping down to the mooring and aiming due West for Tanganyika. By morning, after a failed engine, impossibly high seas, rain, and desperate prayers aimed skywards, they somehow arrived back on the coast of Zanzibar just a little further along from where they’d originally set off - although relieved to be alive. Determination, it seems, was something Kapuściński did not lack.
But nor do most war journalists. It’s part and parcel of the game. What makes Kapuściński more remarkable than the majority, though, is his ability to package his experiences so eruditely and beautifully, in such a way that war becomes strangely incidental in the face of the real Africa: the brilliant fauvist landscape of colour, people and culture. From the very first line of the book, you know you’re in the grip of a writer who knows how to put into words a place that many have found too difficult to define:
“More than anything, one is struck by the light. Light everywhere. Brightness everywhere. Everywhere, the sun. Just yesterday, an autumnal London was drenched in rain. The airplane drenched in rain. A cold wind, darkness. But here, from the morning’s earliest moments, the airport is ablaze with sunlight, all of us in sunlight.”
Step off a plane anywhere in Africa and you know precisely what he means.
