Park City, January 27: Salim Hamdan, Osama bin Laden’s one-time driver who spent seven years locked up at Guantanamo, is in the spotlight once again, this time in a documentary at the Sundance Film Festival.
The second part of Laura Poitras’s trilogy on post-September 11, 2001 America, “The Oath” is competing for a prize at the independent cinema showcase nestled in the mountains of Utah through Sunday.
Her first piece in the series, “My Country, My Country” (2006) earned Poitras an Academy Award nomination.
“As a filmmaker, it makes me nervous to release this film because I know how it can be seen in different ways,” she said in an interview.
“But I knew it from the beginning. It is so politically incorrect to make a movie about terrorism.”
The film follows the daily routines of Hamdan, who was set free in Yemen in January after nearly two months at a political security prison following his release from Guantanamo Bay, and Abu Jandal, Hamdan’s brother-in-law and a former bodyguard of Al-Qaeda chief bin Laden.
Abu Jandal, who Poitras describes as “quite brilliant and very charismatic,” now drives a cab in the Yemeni capital Sanaa.
Questioned at length by the US authorities after 9/11, he takes an uncanny pleasure in blowing hot and cold, defending “holy war” and anti-Western sentiment in one breath while condemning attacks by militants in the next.
But his fragility also crops up when he shares his sense of guilt and regrets at being behind Hamdan’s bid to join jihad.
“He’s clearly an unreliable narrator and I know he can make some people angry, but in the film, we really wanted to make the audience struggle with that,” Poitras explained.
“He is also an anti-hero type character, which I think is much easier to do in narrative… Somehow, doing it in a documentary, showing somebody that you can’t trust, who is dangerous, it’s more difficult to accept. Because I think we are used to documentary being about people who are sympathetic or heroic.”
As a counterpart to Abu Jandal, the documentary retraces Hamdan’s journey to the US military prison reviled around the world, using his letters and interviews with his US lawyers, who Poitras hails as “heroes.”
When she began shooting the film, Hamdan was still locked up at the controversial detention center, and Poitras presented her character as a “ghost” who haunts the movie.
“I wanted to have him haunting the film, have this disappeared person that the family misses and hopefully the audience misses too,” she added, noting that in the United States, few people realize “that there have been people in prison for eight years, without contact with their families, in some kind of purgatory.”
Guantanamo “is some sort of cluster of US mistakes. It’s really quite horrifying how the USA has so completely turned its back on its principles,” Poitras said.
“And Guantanamo is still open. How can it be possible?”
She called Guantanamo, the US-led occupation of Iraq and the horrific torture committed by US troops at the Abu Ghraib prison there some of Al-Qaeda’s “best recruiting tools.”
Hamdan was released while Poitras was shooting her film, something she called a “happy surprise.” But the former detainee refused to participate in the documentary — he has also declined any interviews so far.
“A part of myself regrets it, but I think maybe it’s a more appropriate ending for the film,” Poitras said of Hamdan’s decision to keep his thoughts to himself.
“If you had seen him reunited, it would have been some kind of happy ending. And there is no happy ending in this story.”
—Agencies