AIFF: A Taxi to the Dark Side

[March 2, 2008: Taxi didn't win the best doc at the Anchorage International Film Festival, but it did win the Academy Award. Gibney sold the broadcast rights to the Discovery Channel, but they decided not to show it. But they did sell it to HBO which plans to show it in September.]

I began this about 2pm Sunday but I didn’t have wifi access.

I still need to post on last night’s showing of Joe Strummer. I’m at OutNorth now where the power went out during a showing of Taxi to the Dark Side. We’d seen about 85 minutes of it so we had enough to be pretty incensed (about the content of the movie, not the power outage.)

"Taxi" discusses an Afghan villager who manages to save enough to buy a taxi. He hasn't had the taxi long when he disappears. It turns out he was arrested and imprisoned at American run Baghran prison. A reporter manages to find his family and is shown the documentation they were given with the body. Cause of death, marked by the American doctor, was "homicide."


The power has just come back on so Autism the Musical should be starting.



Many films (there were a bunch in the animation show) later:

The movie interviews guards who were at Baghran at the time of the death as well as senior military officials, journalists, and military attorneys. I try to be objective and even handed. I said to myself, “Well they could be taking things out of context, they could be slanting this” and they could. But they have interviewed enough people intimately involved in the Baghran and Abu Ghraib prisons and senior military personnel - people who would normally be thought of as pro-Bush Republicans - and what they say is consistent with other disturbing things I’m hearing.

The movie was disturbing in many ways, but I was totally sucked into it. Those who continue to deny that the Cheney administration has authorized - unofficially if not officially - torture have to be basing their beliefs on various ideological and/or emotional bases, not logic or reason. In any case, every American voter should see this movie. If it has serious holes, then go at it. But see the evidence that's out there and make your own conclusions.

The video includes the response to the film of audience member JM. I managed to get him in a shaft of sunlight in the powerless Out North.