Reykjavik Dispatch. 1.

In its third year, the Reykjavik International Film Festival is thriving. It has survived a challenge from a competing festival organized by local distributors to show off their wares in Iceland, a tiny market with a total of less than 300,000 inhabitants. This year, its guests include Atom Egoyan, Bahman Ghobadi, two of the Tipton Three (former detainees whose stories are told in The Road to Guantanamo, the shy Aleksandr Sokurov and Yoko Ono (traveling with the official documentary The US vs. John Lennon). Reykjavik means "smokey harbor," and Iceland is a magical place. Who wouldn't want to come here?

One revelation there for me was the documentary Out of Bounds (Hors les Murs) by Pierre Barougier and Alexander Leborgne, a look inside the prison camp of Iwahig, an institution that for decades has attempted to rehabilitate minimum security criminals by giving them near-total freedom within the boundaries of a prison farm cut out of the jungle and bordered by mountains. Men who were convicted of robbery and murder tell their stories as they work on the farm with their families gathering coconuts and herding cattle. Children of prisoners attend school with the families of prisoners and guards. Imagine that in the US.

Some prisoners don't take to the tolerant environment and are sent back to more harsh conditions of confinement, but many commit themselves to change and tell their stories on camera. Utopian? It isn't exactly Club Med and it is an anomaly even in the Philippines, where prisoners explain that gangs control most other prisons and enforce discipline savagely - with murder. It doesn't work for everyone, but it would be hard to argue that this approach is any less effective that the Club Fed lock-em-up-and-throw-away-the-key school of prison operation that seems to be in vogue in the US these days. We can also assume that the Philippines are not putting its many politically threatening Muslim prisoners from the south of the country in anything like this prison.

Out of Bounds couldn't have been more different than Michael Winterbottom's prison saga The Road to Guantanamo, also playing at Reykjavik, which filled the halls wherever it played with young audiences who were eager to share their contempt for George W Bush and the American war in Iraq. (If there are Icelandic supporters of the US in this war, they haven't shown themselves publicly at the festival.) The stars of this show were two of the Tipton Three, Rhuhel Ahmed and Asif Iqbal, the young English-born Asian men who were arrested by the Northern Alliance forces in Afghanistan and then handed over to American troops. The three men were held in Guantanamo and interrogated brutally for two years before their release without charges.

In conversations with Ahmed and Iqbal, who seemed a lot more like young men from England than the kind of murderous prisoners whom George W Bush calls "the worst of the worst," a few things were clarified. The young men took pains to note that, while their treatment was abusive (although far less abusive than the interrogators, especially the female US interrogators intended it to be), some of the Guantanamo guards treated them decently. Korans, they said, were indeed flushed down toilets there, long before the disputed story about that practice appeared in Newsweek. Koran abuse was a regular tactic used to demoralize the prisoners, said the young men, who noted that their religious faith grew during their confinement.

The young men also confirmed that they were far from the youngest at the camp. Young boys who were 12 and 14 arrived - and are still there, they said. The well-publicized suicides, they argue, were not so clearly cases of prisoners taking their own lives. (The US military has called those deaths acts of "asymmetric warfare," intended as public relations maneuvers.) Guards passed through the corridors between cells every two minutes, the young men noted, which would have made it difficult for a prisoner to hang in his cell for two hours before being discovered, as has been alleged in some of the cases.

When asked about their integration back into British society, Ahmed and Iqbal said they were working full-time to promote the film, traveling to festivals where it plays and to countries where it's opened. No news of when they will allowed to visit the US, although the Bush adminstration seems to be doing its best to keep their story alive. (The young men have a suit pending against Rumsfeld and company.)

Seeing the unlikely young film stars there in Reykjavik, alongside Atom Egoyan and other filmmakers, certainly made them look anything but threatening. The president of Iceland, Olafur Ragnar Grimsson, greeted the young men warmly at a reception for Egoyan that took place at the president's house yesterday. It goes without saying that American Embassy staff were nowhere in evidence. (Winterbottom was unable to attend the festival, according to Ahmed and Iqbal, because he is filming A Mighty Heart, the story of Daniel Pearl, a Brangelina Pitt/Jolie project, with Angelina Jolie playing Marianne Pearl.)

In a panel with two of the Tipton Three that had young Icelanders standing in the aisles of an old theater, it was revealed by a local representative of Amnesty International that Iceland was a transit site for secret CIA flights, perhaps flights involving prisoners, she suggested. The investigation that Amnesty and other Icelandic group demanded on this issue was never conducted adequately, the Amnesty rep said. No surprise, the Tipton Two told the indignant crowd. "All governments lie," Rhuhel Ahmed noted.

Also represented in the festival was Matthew Barney, who is something of an adopted son here. As Björk's partner, it might be more accurate to call him an adopted son-in-law. On the program, Barney's work can be seen in Destricted, in which seven filmmakers explore the relationships between pornography and popular culture. My reaction to the compilation reel at Sundance was that artists have now proven that they can make boring pornography like everyone else. Yet Icelanders, especially Icelandic artists, don't seem to think that Barney's work is at all boring. At the Hafnarhus, a massive fish warehouse in the center of town that has been converted into a contemporary art space - something of a Kunsthalle - artists paid unacknowledged tribute to Barney with installations: a collapsed house, a ruined banquet scene complete with crushed eggs, and the piece de resistance, by Magnus Arnason, a hairy starfish on the ceiling from which gelatinous fluids seeped down. Barney's fans might be pleased with this creation, which seems to overlap with the local folky spirit of pagan ur-earthiness.

So far, Barney's influence is harder to spot among Iceland's filmmakers. More about their work in a later dispatch.

Posted by dwhudson at October 4, 2006 3:54 PM