Taxi to the Dark Side

With the recent swirl of controversies over civilian detentions and wrongful deaths, one film sure to get a closer look is Taxi to the Dark Side, which won Best Documentary Film at the 2007 Tribeca Film Festival and last week claimed first prize at the Newport Film Festival as well. Not sure if it has a distributor yet, but keep an eye out...

Taxi to the Dark Side. Directed by Alex Gibney, Produced by Sidney Blumenthal.

• Watch Trailer here.

On December 1, 2002, a Kabul taxi driver named Dilawar took three passengers for a ride, and never returned to his home. Four days later, he arrived at the U.S. military detention center at Bagram Air Base. Five days after that, he was dead. This riveting documentary murder mystery explores how and why this Afghan civilian died while in U.S. custody. MORE

The details emerge through an exhaustive and diverse group of interviews with Dilawar's family and friends; current and former military personnel, a former Guantanamo detainee, lawyers for both detainees and the U.S. military, and a slew of journalists and experts. Created by Alex Gibney, the director of Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, this unflinching look at the Bush administration's policy on torture not only provides a detailed report of what actually happens when a man like Dilawar arrives at a detention center, but also includes interviews from the personnel who interrogated him and inflicted the injuries that ultimately caused his death.

Showing a post- September 11 military culture where rules have been broken and reinvented with little oversight, and where leaders are distant from ground operations, the film exposes the fertile breeding ground that spawned acts Americans would confront in the wake of Abu Ghraib. Skillfully edited and executed, this cinematic documentary is full of stunning shots, shocking photos of prisons and prisoner abuse, as well as news clips and political speeches from a time when most Americans were more naive about what was really happening on the ground. Beginning with tragedy in a small village and winding through the global landscape of the modern

U.S.

military, Taxi to the Dark Side arrives, finally, in the halls of the Pentagon and the White House.