The Prisoner or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair

Husband-and-wife filmmakers Epperlein and Tucker follow up their 2004 boots-on-the-ground doc Gunner Palace with this fast-paced, Pop Art–inflected sequel that addresses the occupation of Baghdad from the local perspective, with results that emphatically do not support official claims that freedom is on the march in Iraq.

The titular subject of Prisoner is Yunis Khatayer Abbas, a freelance journalist whose arrest (in the course of a terrifying nocturnal raid on his family home) was memorably documented in Gunner Palace. As Epperlein and Tucker subsequently learned, Abbas was accused of plotting to assassinate Tony Blair, given the third degree by army interrogators, and then subjected to nine months of degradation and deprivation in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison before being released with no explanation beyond “Sorry.”

Abbas, who’d previously been tortured by Uday Hussein for his political reporting, provides eloquent firsthand testimony about the counterproductive barbarities being perpetrated in the name of our “war against terror.” The filmmakers broaden the implications of his story with military memos stating that many and perhaps most detained Iraqis are similarly guilty of nothing worse than bad luck.

In Abbas’s case, incarceration and torture seem to have generated more sorrow than anti-American rage, but one wonders how many other Abu Ghraib alums will respond that way. (Opens Fri; Landmark’s Century Centre).— Cliff Doerksen