Friday, March 27, 2015

This new documentary explores one of Guantánamo’s most baffling cases...

Patricio Henríquez is arguably one of Canada's foremost documentary filmmakers on the subject of Guantánamo. His 2008 doc, Under the Hood: A Voyage Into the World of Torture chronicled the uses of torture in a post-9/11 world. And in his 2010 film, You Don't Like the Truth: Four Days Inside Guantánamo, Henríquez uses footage of a 2003 interrogation of Canadian detainee Omar Khadr to tell his story and explore the idea of a "forced dialogue."

Henríquez's latest look inside GTMO concerns 22 detainees from the Xinjiang region of China known as East Turkestan. Uyghurs: Prisoners of the Absurd explores the Kafkaesque experience of the eponymous group, most of whom were sold into custody during the early-goings of the war on terror in Afghanistan, only to be declared not enemy combatants a few years later. Yet they were left in a sort of purgatory in the detention camp as the US failed to find somewhere to release the ostensibly free men. The film gets its Toronto premiere at this week's Human Rights Watch Film Festival at TIFF.

 Uyghurs are, after all, Muslims, and have been persecuted and accused of being separatists by the Chinese government for their resistance to the state. Among the many twists and turns in the case of the 22 detainees is the fact that, during the lead-up to the second American invasion of Iraq, for which the US was courting China's approval in the UN, Chinese officials were given "red carpet" access to the Uyghur dissidents while they were in GTMO. Even now, they've been released to places like Albania, Palau, Bahamas, and Switzerland, yet are still effectively considered terrorists-at-large by the Chinese government. Full story...

Related posts:
  1. China orders Australian film-makers to drop Uighur documentary...
  2. Mute Muslims: Why doesn't the Islamic world speak up about China's Uighurs?
  3. 17 Chinese Muslims freed from Guantanamo....
  4. US violates Geneva Conventions at Guantanamo prison...
  5. Is Obama making good on his promise to close Guantanamo?
  6. The real message behind force-feeding hunger strikers in Guantanamo...
  7. 200 Days of Torture: Gitmo detainees still force fed, Obama folds his hands...
  8. Every day in Guantanamo is Groundhog Day... whether you're a guard or a prisoner.

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