The indelible wound for US civil rights in Mauritius and the aftermath of 9/11

Fourteen years of detention and torture in Guantanamo without charge or evidence of crime. Release, trial and ransom in 2016 thanks to a courageous lawyer and a Marine colonel’s crisis of conscience. story of mauritania Mohamedould Salahi is one of many people who have embarrassed American history after 9/11, when suspicions of Islamic terrorism resulted in an obsession with finding scapegoats. It was important to make a film of it, possibly solid and faithful, and show it to the general public. That’s what happened thanks to the 71st Berlinale, posted even when it was online Mauritanian In anticipation of the next Oscar nomination, the Berlinale Special Gala segment awaits programming on Prime Video soon.

Because legal biopic drama directed by Scotsman kevin macdonald – In return was awarded the 2000 Academy Award for Doc one day in september – It is a work of rigor with extensive media coverage supported by two influential interpretations: one side always efficient Jodie Foster (already awarded a Golden Globe as a dramatic hero for this role), on the other hand the intense Franco-Algerian Tahar Rahim To make the best of your repertoire after exploiting with a prophet (A Nabi, 2009) by Jacques Audiard. Indeed, both seem to be the result of a precise choice linked to their respective careers: Foster as an unforgettable prison instigator, hunter of troubled minds (Silence of the Innocents), Rahim as the symbolic interpreter of an unjustly punished prisoner and always Marked for imprisonment (quoted, un Nabi). in their favor, not negligible, it’s also Benedict Cumberbatch In the role of Marine Colonel in charge of covering the “entire”.

An Anglo-American co-production, The Mauritanian is a blasphemy human rights violations In HW Bush’s America (in specific terms of the Geneva Conventions) but also on the practice of concealing and manipulating the truth, which becomes the perfect narrative for its staging. cinematic story, Bisexual by definition between true and false, reality and fiction. Without pretending to be a forerunner on previously covered issues, the film follows the timeliness of facts and emotion as inspired by the Guantanamo Diary, the bestselling memorial penned by the protagonist in 2015. Salahi, still alive, active and widely shown with footage and archive images at the end, serves as the guarantor of his play which has become a film.

For this reason, perhaps, one might object to the value of the text, accusing it of excessive “surveillance” in the conventionality of its lack of translation and expressive freedom, but it is also true that it is difficult. suffered gross injustice From Mauritania he could aspire to the general public in other forms, until the adoption of the documentary language. It is a “genetic” limitation to a cinema condemning the abuse of power on a historical-political scale, built on traditional Anglo-American fiction, which is evaluated subject to criteria other than purely artistic contentTo. That said, the tension, the atmosphere of conspiracy, the sense of fragility of the individual before the criminal and criminalizing institution, the brutality of inhuman torture and the interrogation of the individual as well as the national conscience are strongly written in this film, which, very recently through the story of the past (and present, the Guantanamo issue is still hot issue for US Internal Affairs) warns about future behavior.