The Prisoner is a sequel of sorts to Gunner Palace, the 2004 film that raced to keep up with a single National Guard unit searching around Baghdad for suspected insurgents and bombing materials. For once, embedding worked. The soldiers seemed to have trusted the filmmakers and we got an honesty from young grunts that wasn't straight-jacketed into the recitation of policy talking-points. If you thought there wasn't humor in a war that forced these kids to confront life and death much of the time, you are mistaken. There's an extremely funny side to Gunner Palace.

Less of a race than a reconsideration, The Prisoner follows up on a raid conducted by the same unit in Gunner Palace. Three brothers are taken from their Baghdad home. One of them, squatting in handcuffs, insists that he is a journalist and keeps repeating "shut up, shut up" when the troops tell him to shut his mouth. In Gunner Palace, you don't see this man again once he is taken away.

Michael Tucker doesn't see the man until two years later, when he learns that Yunis Khatayer Abbas was indeed a journalist, cameraman and photographer, professional distinctions which didn't keep him from being confined for nine months. A long stay at Abu Ghraib was included in the package. Yunis was also lodged, courtesy of the American taxpayer, in a tent-prison, which put thousands of detainees and their American jailers in the path of insurgent mortar attacks.

Yunis's English isn't great, but it is good enough to describe an extended captivity that - as the saying goes - would be funny if it weren't so horribly tragic. A US Army female interrogator tells Yunis that he was making bombs at home and that his real goal was to assassinate Tony Blair on a Baghdad visit. Yunis is incredulous, even two years after the fact, which gives him and the entire film a sense of numbness as he recalls being battered again and again with baseless accusations from American intelligence officers. (A US lieutenant colonel who discounts the likelihood of any mistaken raids says in an interview with Tucker that the raid on Yunis's house (nicknamed "Operation Grab-Ass") prevented an attack on a "very important visitor.") Comics-style illustrations by the film's co-director, Petra Epperlein, feed into the mood of incredibility and brutal inanity.