I had hopes that the narrative film I Am Gitmo would provide a nuanced depiction of the experiences of terrorists, actual or innocent, taken to the military prison at Guantanamo, that tiny portion of Cuba still questionably “owned” by the United States. Ever since the shock of 9/11 and the initially justifiable War on Terror, we have read and heard news reports and watched documentaries on what were eventually deemed excesses of interrogation techniques used on suspected terrorists. If one were designated an “enemy combatant,” then they were not protected by the Geneva Conventions of 1949, which otherwise called for a trial. That was the loophole by which the CIA, FBI, and American military justified detention, imprisonment, and the use of torture techniques in the pursuit of actionable intelligence extracted from detainees thought to know the plans of Al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups.
A documentary such as Michael Kirk’s Secrets, Politics and Torture (2015) has already presented damnable facts gleaned by a Senate Intelligence Committee which indicated that such extreme interrogation techniques did not work and were, in fact, forms of torture running counter to international values. A well-made narrative film could strengthen that view by letting us feel what a detainee would have suffered under those expanded guidelines. We would be even more horrified if we were convinced that the prisoner was absolutely innocent of the charges of being a high-ranking member of Al Qaeda.
That is the set-up of I Am Gitmo, described as “based on true events,” but not based on the life of one actual detainee. Gamel Sadek is presented as an Egyptian teacher living in Kandahar, Afghanistan, married to an Afghan, and father of two children. But we see only one brief scene of home life before he is arrested and taken away, first to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan and then to Guantanamo. We learn that he had indeed left his homeland to fight against the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan (1979-1989). His reason: the Soviets were Communists and thereby infidels occupying a Muslim country. Now, months after the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, Gamel’s former association with the mujahideen, including Al Qaeda, once supported by the US, is cause for suspicion. What clenches his fate is the money a neighbor receives for reporting him to the US military as being a terrorist. It is a lie, but sufficient to lead to ten years of hell for the humane, intelligent, religious man, defined without believable proof as “the right arm of Osama bin Laden.”
Interspersed with Gamel’s new life is that of John Anderson, who comes out of retirement to serve as an interrogator for the military’s Criminal Investigation Task Force once again. His principal subject is Gamel. Through conversations and moments of tiny, humane actions (a McDonald’s hamburger and fries, a better cell with a toilet), we might initially see the Christian man who prays “sometimes as much as three times a day” as a moral center of the film.
But it is ultimately Gamel Sadek who is that moral center as he suffers all manner of torture — constant beatings with batons, kicking, hitting with fists, water boarding, sleep deprivation, loud music, interruption of prayers, flashing lights, mock execution, extreme heat, extreme cold, constant humiliation, and hanging by his arms from chains for hours or even days. Despite that catalog of horrors, which allows us to imagine when we would break and confess to whatever our interrogators wanted to hear, Gamel does not break, but instead maintains his humanity throughout, unlike his captors. Sammy Sheik does a fine job of embodying the innocent man wrongfully accused and punished.
This is obviously a low-budget film, but since the majority of the scenes take place in simple settings, prison cells and interrogation rooms at Guantanamo, that really should not matter. Rather than requiring detailed, richly designed settings, the film depends entirely on script, direction, and acting. Some of the dialogue, especially between Sadek and Anderson, is quite good and revealing of the two characters. Eric Pierpoint, as the more traditional interrogator disgusted with the new torture techniques, is acceptable but not remarkable, as are just a few of the secondary actors.
But the majority are undeniably over-acting, a fault of their techniques and the seemingly loose direction of writer/director Philippe Diaz. Maybe they just couldn’t do many takes of each shot and the director just had to accept any shot in which all the words of the dialogue were clear, even if unconvincing in tone. Outstandingly poor and overblown are the scenes involving “Ass inspection” and the attempted sexual seduction of Sadek by a young female soldier.
Where the film does work for me is in its relentless depiction of the array of torture techniques coupled with actual footage of Vice-President Cheney justifying the use of enhanced interrogation techniques “in the shadows of the intelligence world.” With his approval, sadists were given a green light at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, and various secret CIA sites.
After watching the film and revisiting thoughts about 9/11, the War on Terror, and the War in Afghanistan and Iraq, I have the awful feeling that our government’s past actions have tacitly permitted Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to give in to his worst instincts in his own War on Terror. What we learned from the mistakes of excessive US actions two decades ago has not proven to have lasting impact. At least I Am Gitmo forces us to remember our own crimes, no matter how they were once justified by the powers that be.