Taxi to the Dark Side
Directed by: Alex Gibney
(Paradox)
In 2005’s Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, documentarian Alex Gibney accomplished a mightily impressive feat—making the story of energy company Enron’s bankruptcy and accounting fraud surprisingly comprehensible and interesting. With his latest doc, the Oscar-winning Taxi to the Dark Side, Gibney employs the same thoroughness to examine another from-the-headlines topic: the post-9/11 use of torture by the CIA and US forces to interrogate suspected terrorists.The film centres around the story of Dilawar, a taxi driver who was wrongfully imprisoned as a potential terrorist in a US-run facility in Afghanistan, and subsequently died there after sustaining multiple leg beatings. Skillful Gibney uses Dilawar’s story as the hook for a more far-reaching treatise—one that also visits Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, and takes to task the current US anti-terrorism measures, governed by a mess of hazy regulations that permit lengthy imprisonment without proper trials and dignity-denying interrogation techniques. As one talking head puts it, speaking of Dilawar: “There’s a lot of other people out there who are gonna run into this system unless it’s fixed. And you only need one to…remind yourself of what it’s capable of.”
–Lindsay McCarney
This article appears in Oct 23-29, 2008.