Berlin Dispatch. 8.

Competition-wise, the event of the day at the Berlinale was clearly the world premiere of Michael Winterbottom's The Road to Guantanamo, so let me go on a bit about that one before turning to Pen-ek Ratanaruang's Invisible Waves and Rafi Pitts's Zemestan (It's Winter).

The Road to Guantanamo actually gave the festival two events today, the film itself, very enthusiastically received, and the packed press conference that followed, particularly due to the presence of Shafiq Rasul and Ruhel Ahmed, two of the "Tipton Three," the subjects of the film.

A bit of background: Originally, there were four. In the fall of 2001, Ruhel was 19; Shafiq, 23; Asif Iqbal, 19; Monir, 22. They'd grown up together in the town of Tipton, near Birmingham, England. Asif was to be married in Pakistan and, as the four were planning the trip, they heard an Imam in a mosque speaking about the danger Afghans were face as the US prepared to bomb the country. They'd need all the help they could get. The guys decided that, since they'd be over there anyway, why not cross the border, do what they could and get back in time for the wedding before heading back home?

By the time they actually get into Afghanistan - we see all these recollected events reenacted in the film, and I'll get to that in a moment - they realize there's not a whole lot they can do. One of them is sick, too, and just as they begin arranging their trip back across the border, the bombing begins. Chaos. Men, women and children are burned, blown apart and the ones who still can run around aimlessly. Mass confusion. People are leaping on trucks to get out of there. Kabul, Konduz, they're taken from town to town, trying to steer clear of both the Taliban and the Northern Alliance. At some point, they lose Monir. He's never seen or heard from again.

Eventually, the remaining three are captured by the Northern Alliance who are rounding up all foreigners suspected of supporting the Taliban. The threshold for suspicion is very, very low. The jails are crammed. Dangerously. The Americans come in and the three are handed over to them, and that's when their genuine hell begins.

In January 2002, the three are flown to Guantanamo Bay, locked up in cages at Camp X-Ray and later moved to Camp Delta, where they remain until March 2004. During this time, they are subjected to constant, asinine interrogation ("Where is Osama bin Laden?" "I don't kn--" Wham!), searing heat in the day, freezing temperatures at night as they sit in the outdoor cages you've no doubt seen in the papers or on television, physical stress (hands bound tightly between the ankles, ear-shattering noise, strobes) and any number of degrading means of verbal and symbolic abuse straight from a proto-fascist's wet dream.

The combined efforts of the men's lawyers and Amnesty International eventually convince the British government to get them out of there, but as the two at the press conference today were quick to point out, no one has officially admitted their innocence.

Michael Winterbottom put it this way: Imagine someone told you five years ago that the US would set up a prison outside its own borders - in Cuba, no less - in which they held hundreds of detainees (and there are around 500 still there right now), filing no formal charges, denying the right to any trial, never mind a fair one, and flying in the face of any definition of basic human rights. You'd laugh. But we've long since grown used to the idea that there is such a thing as Guantanamo Bay. The aim of the film, paraphrasing Winterbottom, is to get those who see it unused to the idea again.

When asked what the reactions of the US and UK governments might be to the film, he answered, "I don't know, and I don't really care, to be honest." In other words, these two governments have dug a whole for themselves so deep they're unapproachable on the subject of Guantanamo (even when a newly elected conservative German chancellor, otherwise aiming to mend relations, demanded the prison's closing), so the film is directed to the people. In the UK, it will be shown on Channel 4 in early March, followed the next day by a DVD and possibly theatrical release as well.

The Road to Guantanamo is a quick-cut, info-packed film whose ferocious emotional impact arouses anger - fury - as opposed to the deeper, sustained note of sorrow aroused by Winterbottom's Golden Bear-winning In This World. Interviews with the actual Tipton Three punctuate reenactments of events, and this may be where Winterbottom and producer Andrew Eaton may be leaving themselves open to criticism from those who argue, with Bush, that Guantanamo is making America safer: it's not a real documentary, see, so how do we know that these guys' version of how they got there, and what it was like once they were in, can be trusted? But then, those making such arguments aren't going to be convinced anyway. The chance that Winterbottom's unconventional approach will get many, many people unused to Guantanamo again is well worth the risk of having to hear Bush's talking points all over again.

Meanwhile. I suspect Invisible Waves isn't quite the film Pen-ek Ratanaruang, cinematographer Christopher Doyle and screenwriter Prabda Yoon set out to make and doesn't measure up to their previous work together nor, hopefully, to the three future sequels they mentioned playfully today (we'll see whether or not they actually pan out). At any rate, if I'm capable of reading atmo at all, going by the mood on the panel of these esteemed filmmakers and the press at the conference, I'm not alone.

Christopher Doyle dominates the proceedings; Pen-ek Ratanaruang, Asano Tadanobu and Ken Mitsuishi arrive

Briefly, Asano Tadanobu plays Kyoji, a chef's assistant in Macau who's fallen into an affair with his boss's wife. The boss has struck a deal with him: kill her and I'll set up a new life for you in Phuket. He does the deed, sets out on a cruise ship and, wracked by guilt, begins to realize that his string of bad luck is no coincidence. He decides to take matters into his own hands.

Pen-ek Ratanaruang professes to love film noir "and anything with Robert Mitchum," which he'll watch again and again. The idea here is to do something along this line, only, as he told die taz, whenever he sees a Hollywood film, he always wonders what the scenes that are cut out look like. That's one way of approaching Invisible Waves; another is to see it as an anti-thriller that isn't nearly as pretty to look at as Doyle's other work and that has its moments. For me, those moments are a little too few and far between.

One of my favorite scenes in a Woody Allen film is the bit in Love and Death when he parodies a filmmaker he dearly loves, Ingmar Bergman. The profile of one woman is layered over half the face of another as they speak of their angst. I don't remember their lines exactly (the IMDb attributes one of them to Boris, actually: "Wheat... lots of wheat... fields of wheat... a tremendous amount of wheat..."), but I think that at some point, one of the characters actually says, "Life is so terrible."

I thought of this scene on the S-Bahn coming home this evening after seeing Zemestan for two reasons. One: if audiences for world cinema were large enough today to warrant such parodies, they might be made about Iranian films; Boris thinks he knows from wheat, but he never saw The Wind Will Carry Us. Two, I realized what was throwing me off a little about Rafi Pitts's film. The imagery is familiar from so many other films from Iran but the structure, pace, composition, theme and tone are all strictly art-house European. Old school, you might say.

Severe recession in an industrial town. A husband leaves his wife, her mother and daughter to find work elsewhere. They don't hear from him for months. A new guy arrives in town. Falls for the wife. The police tell the wife the husband's dead. The new guy makes his move. Loses his job. The film opens with a sad song, and it's all well-done, though it leaves me neither over- nor underwhelmed, and it ends with a suicide (not who you might suspect) and another sad, sad song. And snow. Lots of snow. A tremendous amount of snow.

Posted by dwhudson at February 14, 2006 2:59 PM