There's been a lot written in the press about the extralegal prison the American military has been running in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. There, people the Bush administration has defined as "enemy combatants" are detained indefinitely, without the protection of the Geneva Conventions or any sort of rights whatsoever. No doubt, some of these people are die-hard extremists best kept behind bars. But among them, we now know, were any number of less (or not at all) dangerous people picked up for being in the wrong place at the wrong time.
However many times we read these stories, it's hard to imagine the reality of the situation at Guantanamo. The media has largely been shut out of the prison, so it's far from clear what's actually going on there. Claims of torture and abusive imprisonment conditions have emerged, along with counterclaims by the military that everything is humane and by the book.
Along comes "The Road To Guantanamo," a film that tells the story of three British men of Pakistani descent who were imprisoned there for about three years before being released, uncharged and without an apology. The film, which won the Best Director award for codirectors Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross at last year's Berlin Film Festival, intersperses interviews with the three men with documentarylike recreations of their ill-fated journey.