There is no doubt that the September 11 attacks were a turning point in the way the United States deals with the world around it. It was a sign that not even in their homeland Americans are safe if there are people with enough hatred and motivation to attack them. In the following years, we saw the counterattack, with the United States miserably justifying the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq and, more recently, blatantly interfering in the domestic affairs of several countries in Latin America, Europe and the Middle East. In the midst of all this, prisoners were taken in the name of the war against terrorism. Many of them were just guilty of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. This was the case of a humble Afghan taxi driver, around whom this Oscar-winning documentary makes harsh critics to the US use of torture techniques to obtain information, at any costs. The question is: does anything go in the fight against terrorism? Did the US military, at some point, become terrorists by doing so in the countries they invaded?
These are sensitive questions, to which it is not possible to give a simple answer. The documentary use photographs and videos of torture victims very well and can be visually disturbing, so I do not recommend it to more sensitive or underage people. These are difficult scenes, as also the descriptions and testimonies of some military who participated in these tortures, and who ended up being the scapegoat that allowed the real responsible - some of them top politicians and Pentagon generals with direct connections to the White House - to escape unpunished from these acts, real abuses of the most basic human rights. The documentary does its job well, informing and exposing the truth with interviews, documents and real testimonies from people who came face to face with what happened.
The documentary is not the most technically remarkable, but it is perfectly visible all the effort of the director, Alex Gibney, who made the documentary with a lot of personal dedication. I think that the relevance of the topic addressed, the frontal and direct way in which it was approached and the questions it raises, in terms of American politics and the moral implications of the use of torture, were more than enough factors to justify the Oscar that was given to him.
These are sensitive questions, to which it is not possible to give a simple answer. The documentary use photographs and videos of torture victims very well and can be visually disturbing, so I do not recommend it to more sensitive or underage people. These are difficult scenes, as also the descriptions and testimonies of some military who participated in these tortures, and who ended up being the scapegoat that allowed the real responsible - some of them top politicians and Pentagon generals with direct connections to the White House - to escape unpunished from these acts, real abuses of the most basic human rights. The documentary does its job well, informing and exposing the truth with interviews, documents and real testimonies from people who came face to face with what happened.
The documentary is not the most technically remarkable, but it is perfectly visible all the effort of the director, Alex Gibney, who made the documentary with a lot of personal dedication. I think that the relevance of the topic addressed, the frontal and direct way in which it was approached and the questions it raises, in terms of American politics and the moral implications of the use of torture, were more than enough factors to justify the Oscar that was given to him.