The movie we are talking about today, the cast is a top cast, including actress Judy Foster, "Doctor Strange" Benedict Cumberbatch, "Shazam" Zachary Levi, "Big Little Lies" heroine Sherlyn Woodley...
Playing the male lead is Taha Raheem, who has had a wonderful performance in the Netflix drama "Viper".
Not surprisingly, the film will also be the seed for this year's Oscars – The Mauritanian.
The film also has another alias: Prisoner 760.
It refers to the real-life Mauritanian, Muhammad Ould Slavhi, who was imprisoned for more than a decade in Guantanamo for no reason.
Shortly after 9/11, Slavhi was arrested by his own police and secretly transported to Guantanamo Prison in Cuba.
The location of the prison is the only military base in the United States built in a socialist country, where the United States has permanent lease rights for historical reasons.
Since the war in Afghanistan, Guantanamo Prison has become the preferred location for U.S. military to hold terrorists. It is not subject to U.S. law and can detain suspects indefinitely and use all means to extract confessions.
The U.S. government insists that Slavhi recruited members of the 9/11 terrorist attacks for al-Qaida and paid for the incident.
In order to let him "confess" more information, the US military ignored the Geneva Conventions and began to use a variety of inhumane torture methods, including sleep deprivation, forced irrigation, sexual abuse, extreme cold torture, noise torture, and light torture.
The archives also record that "Prisoner No. 760" Slavhi was once taken out of prison and subjected to a simulated death sentence.
After all kinds of torture, Slavs was forced to sign a false confession...
During his detention, Slavi became proficient in English through newspapers and books, as well as daily communication with detainees.
Since 2005, he has documented his torture, which was later translated into several languages and published in the Guantanamo Diaries, which was vigorously censored by the U.S. government.
Today's movie "Mauritanians" tells the real story of Slavhi, with the help of human rights lawyers, suing the U.S. government and finally regaining his freedom.
This kind of subject matter that exposes the dark inside story behind real events has produced many good works in recent years.
For example, "Official Secrets", which we talked about before, tells the story of Catherine Gan, a translator of british intelligence agencies, who did not hesitate to expose the dark inside story of the Iraq war to the people on the charge of treason.
The film reflects on power and truth, the individual and the state, war and justice.
For example, the "Torture Report", which also exposed the 9/11 incident and the CIA abuse scandal, is also from the perspective of the "whistleblower" to restore the whole process of the truth surfaced for the audience.
As early as 2014, "Twilight Girl" Kristen Stewart starred in an "X-ray Camp", directly based on the "X-ray Camp" in Guantanamo Prison.
The film tells the story of the heroine, a recruit, who rethinks what is truly fair and just after witnessing the various inhuman treatment suffered by detainees.
From the perspective of narrative techniques, "Mauritanian" does not adopt the single perspective of the above three works, but simultaneously starts from the perspective of the plaintiff, the lawyer, and the prosecution to restore this individual challenge to the country.
In the film, Judy Foster plays Slavic's lawyer, Nancy Holland.
Her ultimate goal is to use all means to find evidence of the U.S. government's illegal imprisonment of innocent people.
But the job is not easy.
First, the abused Slavic has created a crisis of trust for everyone.
Fearing that he would encounter a new round of abuse after revealing the truth, he agreed to provide Nancy with a handwritten personal confession after several persuasions.
Second, all files on Slavs are censored and screened by the U.S. government before they are granted access.
The evidence that Nancy was able to grasp in the early days was simply not enough to constitute ironclad evidence.
In addition, the experienced Nancy, who met with the prosecution only once, saw that the other side was holding overwhelming evidence that Slavs had been forced to sign the confession.
If you don't change your strategy, this lawsuit will definitely lose in the end.
At this critical juncture, Nancy decided to be interviewed by reporters and through the media, the focus of the lawsuit was cleverly changed from "accusing terrorists" to "defending human rights".
Meanwhile, Nancy pushes Slavs further to record what she has suffered in prison.
However, Nancy's opponent, Stewart, the head of the prosecution team, is not idle.
During 9/11, one of the first mates of the hijacked planes was his comrade-in-arms and friend.
Therefore, this case handling is not only his duty as a soldier, but also a "revenge" as a close friend.
However, when Stuart sorted out Slavhi's interrogation materials, he also found that a considerable part of the key information was seriously missing, and Guantanamo Prison refused to provide detailed interrogation records for the record.
Not only that, but an important member of his team was suddenly revoked from all permissions and sent back to his original unit.
All kinds of abnormal phenomena made Stewart begin to suspect that although the government claimed to "make terrorists pay the price", the actual action had long since slipped into the abyss of injustice.
Eventually, the conscience of an officer who had participated in the interrogation revealed that Stewart saw the record full of evil.
The most important main line of the film, with Slavhi's handwritten personal confession as the core, reveals to the audience the various horrific abuses he suffered in Guantanamo through a 4:3 flashback.
The story branches of the three characters in the film also converged at this moment, setting off the first emotional climax of the film -
The so-called "terrorists" are actually civilians from a foreign land who have lost their freedom for no reason, and the so-called "justice" of the US government is nothing more than the revenge and anger hidden under the banner of anti-terrorism.
Both manuscripts and top-secret records have led Nancy and Stewart to reflect more deeply on government and the Constitution, human rights and freedoms.
In particular, Stewart, as a prosecutor, was once caught in a tangled state of conscience and duty.
As a soldier, he must obey orders, complete tasks assigned by his superiors, and ensure that terrorists receive the sanctions they deserve to comfort his compatriots who died on 9/11.
However, he could not ignore the dark truth presented in the archives, and the "confession" held by the government was nothing more than the evil fruit of the poisonous tree, completely deviating from the Constitution, and could not be evidence to overthrow Slavs.
Eventually, Stewart quit the prosecution team and met with Nancy in private to remind her to look at an important box of dossier evidence.
At the end of the film, Slavsy goes to the litigation stage as he wishes, and wins the case with the help of Nancy.
Ironically, instead of being freed immediately after receiving his verdict, he was appealed by the Obama administration and remained in prison for another seven years.
His mother did not wait for him to regain his freedom, and unfortunately died of illness...
From his arrest to his release from prison, Slavs was never formally convicted, but he paid for more than a decade of freedom.
The most direct plot of the film is a personal statement by Slavhi in the litigation link -
"In my hometown, we all know not to trust the police, the law is corrupt and the government will control us with fear.
So when I first arrived at Guantanamo, I was actually happy because I believed there was justice in America. I never thought that I would be locked up for eight years without being convicted, and that a country like the United States would also use fear to control me.
During my time in prison, everyone said I was 'guilty,' just out of doubt and association, and if you had a holiday with the United States, you would always be in trouble.
The people who arrested me will never be able to forgive me for 'doing something', but I now want to choose to forgive them..."
In terms of theme, "Mauritanian", which was born out of real people and real events, is undoubtedly one of the strongest contenders for this year's awards season.
But the biggest value of this movie is to let the audience see the dark scandals hidden by the US government under the banner of "patriotism", "justice" and "anti-terrorism".
Since 9/11, the United States has gone through four presidents, while Guantanamo is still functioning normally, and only 8 of the 779 prisoners in custody have been convicted, and 3 of them have successfully appealed.
Neither the CIA, the Department of Defense, nor the U.S. government has come forward to take responsibility for apologizing for the violent enforcement in prisons.
After watching this movie, I can't help but ask the United States - you were fighting terrorism for "justice", so should you now pay for your arrogance?