Road to Guantanamo

The story of four young Muslims who in September 2001 left the small English town of Tipton for a trip to Pakistan. It starts innocently. Nineteen-year-old Asif is going to see his bride and invites his friends Ruhel, Shafique and Monir to the planned wedding. They meet up in Karachi, and then travel to Afghanistan. There they are arrested by the allied forces. One of them disappears and the three remaining young men, regarded by the Americans as terrorists and collaborators with the Taliban, are interrogated, humiliated, tortured and finally deported to the Guantanamo prison in Cuba. “They always told us that the people in this prison were the most dangerous terrorists in the world, but these were absolutely ordinary English teenagers who found themselves trapped by extraordinary events,” says the director Winterbottom. “The simplest and most effective way of telling their story was just to let them tell it themselves.”