Taxi To The Dark Side
1fastdog.
Posted to Diary on Thu Feb 07, 2008 at 08:26:43 PM EST. RSS.
Alex Gibney, the man responsible for 2005's Oscar-nominated Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room has another Oscar-nominated documentary making the rounds: Taxi To The Dark Side.
The new film casts its eye on the torture and eventual murder of an Afghani taxi driver named Dilawar at the the hands of US military personnel at the infamous Bagram air base.
These kinds of movies (documentaries) don't come close to playing near my sleepy little burg, so I'm curious to see how many people plan to see this film in the theater. I'm going to display a bunch of pull quotes to describe the movie and then ask any interested persons who may have seen the movie (or plan to) to comment.
The Chicago Tribune:
The most extraordinary thing about the grim Best Documentary Academy Award nominee "Taxi to the Dark Side" is how straightforward its interviewees are about the military prisoner they collectively murdered in Afghanistan in 2002. Predictably, no one wants to shoulder the blame, but no one flinches from the cameras' scrutiny, either. They lay out the facts calmly, with regret or defiance. In the process, without preaching, pleading or pressuring viewers, they help make a strong case against government-sanctioned torture.
The Daily News Transcript:
Using the murder as a touchstone for a far more complex inquiry into the administration's culpability in crimes against humanity -- the sort of crimes one generally associates with thugs like Pinochet, al-Bashir and Bush family friend, King Abdullah, Gibney follows a trail of torture through Abu Ghraib and Gitmo that leads all the way up to the Oval Office.
At the center of Gibney's Oscar-nominated film is Dilawar, an innocent 22-year-old Afghani taxi driver apprehended and -- five days later -- killed during his interrogation by American MPs and intelligence officers at the notorious Bagram prison.
The Washington Post:
Even the most dedicated supporter of the war on terror might have trouble digesting what Alex Gibney serves up in his latest film, "Taxi to the Dark Side," whether it's the crimes that have been perpetrated in the name of freedom, or the people who've had to pay for those crimes, or the higher-ups who've run away from them and toward the tender embrace of the Patriot Act.
The San Jose Mercury News:
The Oscar-nominated "Taxi" is made all the more powerful because of its on-screen interviews with regretful soldiers who admit to outrageous acts of brutality. Director Alex Gibney's title refers to Dilawar, a taxi driver from Afghanistan who drove off with three passengers one December morning in 2002 and never came home again.
These members of the military were dubbed the "few bad apples" by Bush administration officials, but the new documentary "Taxi to the Dark Side" painstakingly illustrates how the rot that reached them came from the highest branches of government. It demonstrates, vividly, how systematic torture, in direct opposition to the Geneva Convention, was an unwritten but well-practiced policy in American-run prisons in Afghanistan, Iraq, Cuba and other countries.
Metacritic's pull quote:
Taxi to the Darkside, the latest prize-winning documentary from Oscar-nominee Alex Gibney, confirms his standing as one of the foremost non-fiction filmmakers working today. A stunning inquiry into the suspicious death of an Afghani taxi driver at Bagram air base in 2002, the film is a fastidiously assembled, uncommonly well-researched examination of how an innocent civilian was apprehended, imprisoned, tortured, and ultimately murdered by the greatest democracy on earth. Intermingling documents and records of the incident with candid testimony from eyewitnesses and participants, the film uncovers an inescapable link between the tragic incidents that unfolded in Bagram and the policies made at the very highest level of the United States government in Washington, D.C. Combining the cool detachment of a forensic expert with the heated indignation of a proud American who holds his country to a high standard, Gibney's film reveals how the Bush administration has systematically betrayed the very ideals it professes to uphold. (THINKFilm)
Gibney does an interview with The Brooklyn Rail and talks torture for those interested.
Thoughts?
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