Film: Taxi to the Dark Side (dir by Alex Gibney, ThinkFilm/Jigsaw Productions, 2007)

Taxi to the Dark Side is Alex Gibney's Critical study of extra-legal expansion of American Power in America's Global War on Terror.

The film focuses around the controversial death in custody of an Afghan Jitney taxi driver named Dilawar. Dilawar was beaten to death by American soldiers while being held in extrajudicial detention at the Bagram Air Base.

Taxi to the Dark Side also goes on to examine America's policy on torture and interrogation in general, specifically the CIA's use of torture and their research into sensory deprivation. There is description of the opposition to the use of torture from its political and military opponents, as well as the defence of such methods; the attempts by Congress to uphold the standards of the Geneva Convention forbidding torture; and the popularisation of the use of torture techniques in shows such as 24.

The film is said to be the first film to contain images taken within Bagram Air Base.

For those of us who feel that part of winning the vast majority of worldwide moderate Muslims over to a situation of tolerance and respect for Western peoples and governments requires that innocent civilians be treated with utmost respect and care, even in areas where terrorist militants have operations, this is one of those films that shows why it is going to take years of work by the next few American government leaders to undo the damage that was done in the Bush Administration.

The Tyranny of America's Great Expectations

On January 8th, the Wall Street Journal's Bret Stephens wrote a piece about American politics and how we look at Iraq. He cites cases of "the perfect becoming the enemy of the good", something that also troubles me.

While the op-ed is somewhat oversimplified, I was taken by these two paragraphs towards the end of the piece:

There is great virtue in the American way, which expects CEOs to perform on a quarterly basis, presidents and Congresses to reinvent politics in 100 days, generals to wipe out opponents in 100 hours without taking significant casualties, doctors to save life and limb every time, search engines to yield a million results in less than a second, and so on. There is also great virtue in the belief that what is bad can be made good, and that what is good can be made great, and that what is fractionally less than great is downright awful.

But these virtues can spawn vices. One is impatience. Another is a culture of chronic complaint. A third is the belief that every problem has a solution, that trial is possible without error, that risks must always be zero, that every inconvenience is an outrage, every setback a disaster and every mishap a plausible basis for a lawsuit.

Film: Helvetica: A Documentary Film (Gary Hustwit, Swiss Dots, 2007)

Quite an interesting documentary about visual culture has been made by Gary Hustwit. See Helvetica: A Documentary Film website.

Film: HotHouse by Shimon Doton (86 min, 2006)

  

Media That Matters' David Courier writes:

Nearly 10,000 Palestinians are incarcerated in Israel today. Most Israelis regard these "security prisoners" as murderers and criminals. To the Palestinians, however, they are freedom fighters, heroes, and martyrs in the making. Granted extraordinary access to the highest-security institutions, renowned filmmaker Shimon Dotan uncovers a startling truth: Israeli prisons have become a breeding ground for the next generation of Palestinian leaders and a hotbed for terrorist plots.

Dotan focuses his camera on everyday prison life. What emerges is a surprising glimpse of the prisoners as informed thinkers who are immersed in the details of the centuries-old conflict through newspapers and television. Dotan interviews inmates who are committed to negotiations as well as others who are shockingly unrepentant about their participation in suicide bombings. The cold-blooded testimony of a female Hamas leader, proudly serving 16 life sentences for blowing up a Sbarro restaurant in Jerusalem, is perhaps the most chilling.

Israel's prisons have evolved into virtual incubators for Palestinian nationalism, strengthening inmates' ideology and forging a political force that impacts far beyond their walls. Eschewing the simplistic "white hat, black hat" mentality that dominates discussions of terrorism today, Dotan's brilliantly constructed, disturbingly provocative film is both a humanizing force and an alarming wake-up call.

For more information about this amazing documentary, see First Run Icarus Films HotHouse page.

Film: Mapping Stem Cell Research: Terra Incognita (Maria Finitzo, ITVS, 2007)

Maria Finitzo has made, and PBS Independent Lens television series has aired, a beautiful and brilliant story about people involved in fundamental medical research. The film is called Mapping Stem Cell Research: Terra Incognita and the central character is Northwestern University Neurologist Dr. Jack Kessler, but what makes this such a strong film is how the story is told from the point of view of 10 individuals.



Information about this extraordinary film is at Independent Lens' Mapping Stem Cell Research: Terra Ingcognita website.