BuzzFlash Reviews

BUZZFLASH REVIEWS

We've learned that BuzzFlash readers are not particularly interested in documentaries about the military in Iraq or Abu Ghraib (with the exception of Robert Greenwald's "Iraq for Sale"). Perhaps, like us, our readers know how horrible the Bush actions over there have been. Our minds are made up. Why have the horror rubbed in our faces?

But we are highly recommending this little treasure of a documentary that captures the Kafkaesque Bushevik enterprise known as the Iraq War: "The Prisoner Or How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair."

It took Anne Frank, the story of one teenage girl, to capture the dreadful crimes of the Nazis in killing millions of people. That is because we, through her diary, came to know Anne Frank as a young woman filled with hope, intelligence, youthful romance, family conflicts, and fear. She came to represent the deaths of millions, because she embodied so much promise and the dreams of youth.

In the case of "The Prisoner," we come to learn of one episode of absurd injustice through the narration of one Yunis Khatayer Abbas. Abbas is an earnest Iraqi journalist from a close knit family. He dreams of becoming a famous reporter on CNN.

One night, he and his three brothers are inexplicably arrested by American forces. (We see the actual video footage of the arrest for reasons that become clear when you view the film.) Only after he is seized and interrogation begins does Abbas learn that they were taken prisoners because the American military was accusing them of plotting to kill Tony Blair, which, as you will learn from the documentary, is laughably ludicrous.

What makes this documentary so engaging is that Abbas has a droll sense of absurdist humor that allows him to endure nine months in a tent detention camp on the Abu Ghraib grounds. This is a site where thousands of Iraqis were detained for the sole reason that the Busheviks didn't want to release them because it would have proven that not everyone at Abu Ghraib was guilty of anything at all relating to the war. In fact, the vast majority were detained for no justifiable reason at all.

Finally, Abbas is taken to the "hard jail" at Abu Ghraib, questioned for two weeks, at the end of which he was brought into a military commander's office. The commander told him that he was free to go with his brothers, that their arrest had been a mistake, and that the American military was "sorry" about it.

As Abbas tells his story -- in retrospect -- the film is divided into chapters. When video footage was not available, appropriate cartoon-like graphics are used to illustrate various encounters.

Of particular irony is the fact that in the late '90s Abbas was arrested and tortured by Uday Hussein, son of Saddam, for writing about the Western boycott of Iraq. Then too, he was abruptly released -- after a chilling meeting with Saddam Hussein himself.

"The Prisoner" is a testament to the ability of Abbas to maintain a perspective not unlike Kurt Vonnegut on the twists and turns of his misfortunes and the blessings of his loving family.

And, yes, there are also good and decent American soldiers who Abbas meets, including one reservist named Thompson, who is interviewed back in the States, long after the detention that is the subject of the film.

Thompson represents what we have longed for, the caring soldier who connected with the humanity of his "prisoners" and sought to assist them as best he could.

Abbas was deeply grateful for that.

And we should be deeply grateful for Abbas telling his story in such a clear, engaging and humanistic manner.

We highly recommend this short but compelling film.

Through a series of circumstances, we are able to see the Iraq War through the lens of one of millions of personal experiences that sheds light on the absurdity of the entire undertaking.

Review from the Los Angeles Times:

"It is a painful testimony to just how long the ongoing war in Iraq has been with us that filmmakers are now returning to the topic for sequels, sidebars and further inquiries. It was while shooting footage for "Gunner Palace" in 2003 that filmmaker Michael Tucker videotaped a raid on a Baghdad house suspected as part of a plot against British Prime Minister Tony Blair. Upon returning to Baghdad some months later, Tucker would follow up on the whereabouts of the men taken into custody that night, leading him down the unexpected rabbit hole of the story of Yunis Abbas, a freelance journalist held for eight months at Abu Ghraib even after it was determined he was of no intelligence value nor guilty of any crime.

As directed by Tucker and Petra Epperlein, "The Prisoner or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair" is a chillingly pitch-black comedy of errors, as unlikely as that may sound. Assembled from post-jail interviews with Abbas, as well as a former American soldier who oversaw his detainment, footage and photographs taken by Abbas himself, and Epperlein's bold comic-strip drawings, the film becomes a dizzying descent into a world of contradictions, military illogic and ineffectual bureaucracy.

After extensive interrogations, when Abbas was finally told of his suspected participation in the plot to kill Blair, he recalls that he laughed out loud at the absurdity of the idea.

It is this response that forms the core of "The Prisoner," a sense that the events being discussed have to be portrayed with a slight mischievous surreality because they are too preposterous to take with an entirely straight face.

If this were fiction, it would seem unbelievable, and yet here it is, an all-too-real tale of survival amid the soulless machinery of war and occupation."

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