Berlin Dispatch. 12.

Although it only won a second prize at the Berlinale, a Silver Bear for direction, Michael Winterbottom and Matt Whitecross's new film certainly won the exposure award. As soon as The Road to Guantanamo screened in the Competition, the film and its emphasis on the fact that some 500 prisoners are still held at Guantanamo without charges were all over the media. The film tracked the cases of three British citizens of Pakistani origin (a fourth disappeared in Afghanistan and hasn't been heard from since) who were traveling into Afghanistan when the US invasion began, and, unable to cross back into Pakistan, found themselves in a war zone, where they were arrested, imprisoned and sent to Guantanamo. The three were released after years of interrogation and torture. These are your US tax dollars at work.

People are calling the film a semi-documentary - with interviews with the Tipton Three, as the young men are called, plus dramatized sections of their journey and their confinement. If you've seen Winterbottom's films, you know that they all tend to look like documentaries.

As the United Nations knows too well, investigators (including the International Red Cross) are not allowed to talk to prisoners at Guantanamo. UN investigators never went there when they were told they'd never get near any of the prisoners, none of whom have been charged. Winterbottom didn't lack for witnesses. He had his released prisoners to question. The position of the Guantanamo apologists in the US government is that prisoners are trained to say that they've been tortured. This has been US Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's response to the UN Commission's recommendation to close Guantanamo. From what I've seen, it's a response that doesn't require much training.

The attacks on Winterbottom and his co-director Matt Whitecross have run largely parallel to those directed toward the UN Commission. A critic at one of the German dailies faulted the film for looking too much like a CNN report, an odd reproach, since Winterbottom's films always have a collage element to them, and coverage of events that we have seen only on television seem to be a natural part of that palette.

Another complaint that I heard at the Berlinale was that the film should have been about the much greater evils of the Taliban. Those films have been made, I thought, although the investigation into Guantanamo, up to now, seems to have been denied the visual dimension that was so essential to it. We have it now, and we have to assume that the fact that the actual Gitmo sections of the film were shot in Iran must have been infuriating to the flag-wearers. No doubt it was intended.

Winterbottom and Whitecross render the urgency of central Asian bus travel turning desperate - from traffic jams to the fog of war in a day or so, all the more tactile thanks to the handheld camera and clouds of dust and smoke that make you distrust your eyes. The camera races to keep up in Afghanistan, and it watches mutely when the ritual of prostration, interrogation and humiliation repeats and repeats in Guantanamo. We also saw some of the same visual storytelling in In This World, which showed in Berlin two years ago and won the Golden Bear. The filmmakers are also right on target once the three travelers enter the bureaucratic black hole of the system, hoods and all, only to be released without charges in 2004. You've seen the same hoods in the Abu Ghraib photos.

Other attackers, and there will be many more, say the film (and the UN) avoid crucial facts that might show Guantanamo to be a far less gruesome place than Winterbottom would have us think. Let me guess. Was it the fact that, while prisoners are being treated brutally, the lasagna on Mondays really isn't too bad?

The power of Winterbottom's film doesn't come so much from the facts, but from the drama. You don't see this semi-documentary as a documentary, but as a feature. Seeing it through might be the better term. You can come out of Guantanamo feeling as if you've been in a war, or as if you've been through torture. Of course you haven't, but that's the power of cinema. It's also the willingness to believe that the delivery of feelings is the thing itself. Yet the mere fact that you've stayed in the theater for 90 minutes will probably give you more information on the reality of Guantanamo than you knew before.

I've written a lot before on documentaries these days (and semi-documentaries, I suppose) as crucial substitute journalism at a time when media have retreated from their responsibility to report accurately and critically. This is one benefit that comes from concentrating the human attention - getting information in depth, or getting your feeling immersed in a story so deeply that information also seeps in. If another argument were needed in favor of seeing films in theaters without interruption, this could be it. I'd like to show this film to teenagers, to as many as possible.

Perhaps Winterbottom will be accused of treason by his British critics for showing the "coalition" effort that Britain contributes to torturing prisoners. Bear in mind that these prisoners are, given the circumstances, the lucky ones - they are those who survived confinement in shipping containers in Afghanistan and indiscriminate shooting. If an American had made this film, the charge of treason would certainly follow. Is that reasonable? Yet what's more American than the story of a man or of men wrongly accused and wrongly imprisoned - for better or worse, it's the gift that keeps on giving, the staple of American documentaries, like The Thin Blue Line and like the excellent new film, The Trials of Daryll Hunt, directed by Rickie Stern and Annie Sundberg, the story of a decade-long fight in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, to exonerate an innocent teenager convicted of rape and murder, which played at the European Film Market.

In Daryll Hunt, the conviction and sentence of an innocent man stood, even when testimony was shown to be false, a DNA test cleared him, and the real murderer confessed. In the "war on terror" that justifies the treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo, people are rounded up indiscriminately in Afghanistan. Once in confinement, many are told repeatedly that they can escape mistreatment if they just admit membership in Al Qaeda, and none has been charged with anything. The closer you look at Guantanamo, the more compelling a story you have, and the larger the holes become, like the WMD myth.

The "war on terror" was foregrounded by virtue of the attention Winterbottom's film got throughout the festival, but the effects of a vastly different war were localized in the film that won the Golden Bear, Grbavica, the mother-daughter story set in Sarajevo, directed by Jasmila Zbanic. As everyone must know by now, given the plot summary that you tend to get in the coverage of a film that wins the major prize at a major festival, a single mother (Mirjana Karanovic) fights her own grief and her restless teenage daughter to keep the identity of her daughter's father a secret. The daughter was conceived when her mother was raped in a Serb prison camp, and she is one child among more than we can count. Some wars never end, a persistent truth in Sarajevo - and in a city like Berlin, where thousands of "Germans" who are now approaching retirement were conceived by Russian liberators in 1945. Some people create their own destiny, and some have destiny thrust upon them.

Grbavica is a modestly conceived film, shot under mostly rainy skies, where ordinary people vent personal frustrations in cramped apartments, or in the nightclub where strippers dance for $100 Euro tips from the local Mafiosi who seem to be running things these days. The effects of the war remain tragic years on. Men and women who made huge sacrifices work at miserable jobs, some of them hoping for hard-to-get work permits anywhere in the West. Surviving for them is getting out. The black marketeers who thrived during war scarcities are thriving again. And this was a moral war, a war worth fighting.

From Israel, the longest war that we saw at the Berlinale was shown in some of its rarely-seen details in Close To Home, directed by Dalia Hager and Vidi Bilu. It's a story of soldier girls, and I mean girls, since these are teenagers who patrol the streets of Jerusalem, asking Palestinians (and only Palestinians) for identification. Racial profiling is alive and well. This is also a modest film, where the camera never strays too far from an army post or from the stones and streets of Jerusalem. Obviously, not too much was spent on costumes. You don't have to dress Jerusalem up to make it cinematic.

There are at least two stories here. One is the understandable inside portrait of girls under extreme authority, an obligation that Israeli women have had since the 1940s, but a duty that has hardened as the post-1973 occupation, post-Lebanon invasion, post-intifada realities have accumulated. I'm sure that for some potential viewers, inside the barracks promised to be as good as inside the harem. Of course, it wasn't that, but it was the perennial private's perspective on the army experience that few people cherish at the time, army nostalgia notwithstanding. We see petty punishments and petty rebellions. If you've been anywhere near the military, you've seen a version of it. We call it chickenshit.

The second story is the story of young soldiers, even girls, hardened into occupiers with small annoying powers over everyday life. They can stop any Palestinian on the street for any reason, and they do. It's all humiliation, all the time, and all this is happening as hormones are running strong. Does this make for good relations, or good judgment? Let's just say that if Dick Cheney can shoot the wrong person, these teenagers might.

Jump Cuts

In Offside, by Jafar Panahi, one of my favorite filmmakers, diehard soccer fans who happen to be girls (dressed as boys) find themselves shut out of an important match by soldiers who catch on to their disguise. Their mania for sports becomes a metaphor and a window onto Iranian society. The soldiers who will talk to them try to explain why women are not permitted inside the stadium. One reason is that these girls, who curse shamelessly themselves at the soldiers, might see curses written on the walls. It gets even more absurd as the film evolves with the discussion over why they can't go in. As always, Panahi draws extraordinary performances out of amateurs, so natural that you can't believe that there's a real script. When you watch girls who have been rounded up and detained by soldiers dance and shout "Long live Iran" when a goal is scored, Iranian nationalism becomes a complicated thing to define.

Requiem, one of the most anticipated films at the Berlinale, is a perplexing movie - a drama about a woman who leaves her religious family home and oppressive mother and enters a university, only to be stricken with what looks like epilepsy. It looks like something else if you're the Catholic priests who were attending to her. When the smart and ambitious Michaela stops taking her medication in order to complete her coursework, her condition worsens. She seeks counsel from priests, and they finally decide that she's possessed. What follow are a family meltdown and preludes to exorcisms (this is all based on a true story), which look like religious shock therapy. And then the film by Hans-Christian Schmid ends, telling us that Michaela eventually died from these treatments. Am I missing something, or did this lopsided story end where it should have begun the ascent to a crescendo? This should have been treated like a murder, not half of a character study.

The subject of L'Ivresse du Pouvoir (A Comedy of Power) by Claude Chabrol is government corruption, and the difficulty faced by those who want to stop it. Isabelle Huppert plays - what else? - a cold, work-driven judge determined to punish government officials who are on the take from corporations. Sound familiar? The problem with this ultra-French tale isn't that it's generic, although it is - the sexless Huppert stares down decadent cynical male crooks (for a while, at least) and also endures the inadequacies of a scientist husband who can't accept the fact that she works hard and gets more attention than he does, to the point where he jumps out the window, literally. Subtle enough for you? The problem also isn't that the film has no visual style, unless white interior walls and grey corporate offices turn you on. The real problem is that we never get an adequate explanation of exactly what she's fighting. Perhaps the French know their leaders so well that their official misdeeds don't need to be explained. Tell that one to the judge.

Posted by dwhudson at February 20, 2006 4:33 AM