Tue 27 Apr 2010
Outside The Law: Stories from Guantanamo at the Free Word Centre
Written by Laura Jenkinson
Photo: Aneta Kosmala
The Free Word Centre in Farringdon, just behind the Betsey Trotwood pub, is still under a year old but is establishing itself quickly as a centre for Literature, Literacy and free expression. Tonight’s film, the first at this venue, fits with the centre’s motto and provides a voice for ex-‘detainees’ of the most famous apparent non-prison on the planet. Director-Producers Polly Nash and Andrew Worthington have put together a very eloquent story from 9/11 to present day; the film is simple, relying on the talking heads of legal and political experts and Omar Deghayes and Moazzem Begg who were ‘detained’ at Guantanamo for several years, and still photographs representing the absent parties responsible for the atrocities of ‘Enhanced Interrogation Techniques’ practised by a White House flouting the Geneva convention. The film relies on not distancing its viewer with documentary techniques of voiceover and re-enactment – in fact it has been criticised by channel programmers for not fitting the style of television today, although Nash and Worthington both regard this as the film’s unfiltered strength.
It was a suitably modern film for this spacious and airy venue which, despite a few early technical hitches, pleased its audience, who also found it suitably humbling to meet Begg and Deghayes at the Panel discussion afterwards. It is hard to imagine these well-spoken, eloquent, charismatic and confident men suffering the abuses discussed and pictured. They looked so comfortable in themselves whilst answering the audience’s questions on the continuing fate of those left at the prison, and spoke factually rather than with emotion about the apparent new extrajudicial killings ordered by the new US government that are more ‘convenient’ than extraordinary renditions. A remarkable evening.
