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In February, I thought that The Road to Guant�namo was one of the high points of the Berlin International Film Festival, where it made its world premiere. After seeing the film again recently, just before its release in the US this past weekend, I still feel that way. The story is of four young men of Pakistani origin traveling from the English Midlands to Pakistan, then venturing for vaguely charitable reasons into Afghanistan, where three are caught up in the town of Kunduz as the Taliban surrender to the Northern Alliance. They are taken prisoner with everyone else that the Northern Alliance rounds up, and eventually sent to Guant�namo, where they are subjected to abusive interrogations that the US says fall short of torture. (Ask the recent suicides whether they thought it was torture.)

The film operates mostly as a dramatic recreation of these events, culminating with the release of the Tipton Three from their prison in Cuba when documents showed clearly that none of them had been present at Al Qaeda meetings before 9/11 that they were accused of attending. (A fourth friend was lost on the Afghan-Pakistani border, and has never been heard from since.) In a film that could have been either a lecture or a newsreel, there's a sensitivity to character and context here, a gritty nose-to-the-ground tactility that directors Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross achieved with a shoestring crew. It's the chronicle of a miscarriage of justice - if justice really is the word that should be used - a humanizing look under the hood, if you'll permit that awful turn of phrase. You wonder, if these three men were innocent, how many more of the prisoners there might be just as innocent. Perhaps we could even find out - if the US government would just show that the "enemy combatants" caged there were really terrorists. It would only involve bringing them before a court and allowing lawyers for the men to evaluate the evidence.

In the frenzy of press coverage that spiked in Berlin and has surged again with the film's release, two criticisms of The Road to Guant�namo recur.

One charge is that the film is one-sided, which I assume presupposes the criticism that the film does not conform to the Fox News "fair and balanced" approach to reporting. (What ever happened to fair and accurate, the real standard?) It is a dramatic feature film, after all, but in today's situation, in which gaps in reporting are indeed filled by films, books, blogs, talk shows and television programs, we can also view and evaluate this film as a work of journalism. It's not a systematic study of Guant�namo, but rather, the story of the three men, corroborated by sworn testimony from the three of them to their lawyer. We hear the young men's stories, in re-creation and in testimony from Asif Iqbal, Shafiq Rasul, and Ruhel Ahmed. We also hear interrogators repeat over and over that the three were in Pakistan planning terrorist attacks, offering as proof the photos in which the men are alleged to appear. In the face of that "evidence," the men repeat that they were in England at that time. It could have been checked easily enough, in less than a week. When it finally is checked, after two years, the men are released. What a way to run a war.

You can find a certain kind of balance in Winterbottom's film in the tension between men who proclaim their innocence (except for Asif's confession after a torture session) and men assigned to get information out of them, even if that means coercing a false confession out of a man who's been shackled into a squatting position. Perhaps the balance that critics demand could have been enhanced by cutting to shots of the burning World Trade Center, the reason for the War on Terror. Would those shots of New York under siege have made the three detainees any less innocent?

The other criticism is that we really don't know if the three men went into Afghanistan to help suffering Muslims there, as they say they did. Statements by anyone trying to avoid prison or torture are best viewed with skepticism. They are also best verified, as are any charges brought against them. Ultimately, after insisting that the three men were in Pakistan attending Al Qaeda rallies before 9/11, the US and the UK could substantiate nothing against the men, and they were set free. The US position still seems to be that the detainees at Guant�namo were (and are) "bad men," some of "the worst," George W. Bush said, because they were foreigners in Afghanistan and, ergo, Al Qaeda. With "intelligence" like that, you can't be too encouraged, and torture isn't going to make that "intelligence" any more reliable. If, as an investigation, The Road to Guant�namo is deficient, and I don't think it is, the solution is more investigation. The US, with all its resources couldn't find implicating evidence. Good luck to the enterprising journalists (critical of the film, as many are) who are willing to take their shots. Don't hold your breath.

The Road to Guant�namo really follows two roads. The main narrative takes us through a road trip, into a war (with as much confusing "fog" as any war), and then into a prison saga in which jailers try to "break" men in cages, three innocent men. The three men who were never charged travel toward Cuba by way of a trip to Pakistan, then to Afghanistan, then in stifling cargo containers with no air, water or food (Camp X-Ray seems like Canyon Ranch, compared to that experience), then to a C-130 in which they're shackled to the walls for what must have been an endless ride, and then to the cages in which they are blindfolded and subjected what sure seems like torture, regardless of the excuses that are subsidized with your tax dollars. As the detainees' lawyer Joseph Margulies explains in his valuable book, Guant�namo and the Abuse of Presidential Power, prisoners are brought to despair to get them to talk - not for the purpose of providing information that will convict them and prove that the government was correct to round them up and torture them, but for the purpose of pre-empting another attack on the US, or so we're told.

Besides the prisoners' road to, and eventually, from Guant�namo, there's the road that the US took to get there, the odyssey of a government caught sleeping (that had shifted anti-terrorism resources under John Ashcroft from the hunt for bin Laden to the hunt for child pornography). Embarrassed, the government solution has been blunt overkill, justifying a foreign invasion on evidence as slim as the evidence against the Tipton Three, and condoning "legitimate interrogation techniques" as anything that falls short of organ failure. A US general referred officially to the recent suicides as "asymmetric warfare."

This second road is the road less-scrutinized in this film, the road taken away from accountability and toward the official legitimizing of what we used to call "cruel and unusual punishment." Like any narrative that is constrained by logistics and form (and the demands of entertainment) to assemble its elements selectively, this one asks you to fill in the blanks, to draw conclusions based on the intelligence you have.

The Road to Guant�namo is a gripping drama that's as exciting as anything on the screen right now. It's the story of three prisoners and how they got there, by no means the definitive word on the prison and the policy that condones torture there. How could it be, with events unfolding right now, and prisoners petitioning the US for compensation, and a secret prison at Bargram Air Base in Afghanistan that seems to be designated as the new Guant�namo? Stay tuned.

Michael Winterbottom does manage to get in a dig or two that he must have enjoyed. The "Guant�namo" that was reconstructed for the film was built in Iran, the "axis of evil" state, where much of the film was shot. Filming this expose (destined for a US public, among others) in Iran must have been a bit like Hugo Chavez sending free oil to Americans who couldn't afford the rising corporate fuel prices last winter.

I spoke to Michael Winterbottom when he was in New York for the film's US release.

There's a lot of talk about this film filling in gaps of information that the press hasn't covered. It's been a constant theme. How do you view that? There was a lot of reporting about these three young men in the British press, quite a lot, although you might argue that newspaper articles don't have the impact of a single feature film. Did press reports help you, or did you end up having to do most of the research for this story yourself?

We're telling the story of just these three individuals. It's very specific. It's not a film about a general situation. The research was that Mat Whitecross, the other director, spent a month living in with them, so we have hundreds of hours of tapes with them. They'd also done a deposition with Gareth Pierce, their lawyer, so in a sense the research for this film was very specific. The reason we made this film was that we had read the story of these guys in the press. But when we were searching the archive for material for the film, the news archive, it was interesting to go back to the beginning of Guant�namo and see the way it was reported then. It was a huge story, and you could see from the way the journalists were reporting it that they couldn't quite get their heads around it themselves. "Hang on, America's got this prison in Cuba, these people are going to be covered by American law or by international law, they aren't treated as prisoners of war?"

Those first images of all the guys in the orange jump suits being held in Camp X-Ray were very powerful. It's not that the press hasn't done its job. There are individual journalists who have tried to keep writing about it. The Observer, for instance, and the TV news covered it. But what happens is that, no matter what you think of Guant�namo, after two years it's not a story anymore. It's very hard to keep saying, "Look, it's still here." So it just seemed that, if we made the film, it would be one other way of reminding people that Guant�namo is still there.

Also, if you see three individuals - that's part of the reason I wanted them to be in the film - and you hear their story, it gives you a different perspective on Guant�namo, because so much of the imagery, so much of the way the situation was handled by the American authorities was to make them anonymous. They didn't release the names, they didn't tell you very much about them. They all looked the same, all were kept so far away that it was always very distant. It was always this very strange group of people about whom we were always told that they were the worst of the worst, the most dangerous terrorists in the world, who are such a big threat that we have to have them like this. Our idea was that, if for an hour and a half in the cinema you're watching three individuals and what happened to them, that will give you an extra layer of understanding.

There's a genre in American film, dramatic feature and documentary, of the wronged individual or individuals, the victims of miscarriages of justice railroaded, as we would say, into prison. I'm thinking of I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang or The Thin Blue Line or the recent Trials of Darryl Hunt, which shows how an innocent man can be kept in prison for years after there's overwhelming evidence of his innocence. There are also comedies on in this vein, like Sullivan Travels by Preston Sturges, in which a millionaire posing as a homeless man in a research project for a film is arrested, convicted and jailed. Were you thinking of this genre at all when you decided to make a feature film about the Tipton Three?

No, to be honest. The film is split into three parts. There's a road movie, there's a war movie, and there's a prison movie. What we're doing is very simply telling their story - to try and avoid the normal genre conventions, to try and avoid the fictional dramatic devices you would normally use to try to make a story interesting. The story in the film is told to you by the three guys, and the re-creations simply reenact things that they are telling us. I was trying to avoid it being dramatic, in a way, and certainly trying to avoid it being fictional, trying to avoid characters, even.

This is also not a film that is about wronged individuals. I wouldn't want people to leave the cinema thinking, "These guys were so unlucky. These are the three innocent ones, and everyone else there was guilty." I certainly don't want people to think that these guys were unlucky to have a bunch of guards who went crazy and tortured them. What we're trying to show is that this is the routine of the system. This is not a film about the individual isolated example which is different to the general. Shafiq, Ruhel and Asif, in a way, had a very easy time there. What you see happening in Guant�namo is just the routine of the system, the routine of interrogation. So things like stress positions, short shacklings, strobe lights, loud music, the isolation - all these things are part of what the system of Guant�namo does, which the system in Guant�namo feels is acceptable. This is just what goes on routinely in Guant�namo, and hopefully, people, when they watch the film, will think that this shouldn't happen. But the [Bush] administration thinks it should be like that, and it's set up so these things do happen.

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