Preview Screening: Taxi to the Dark Side FULLY BOOKED

Screening Monday 9th June, 2008

Awarded Best Documentary Feature at this year’s Oscars, Taxi to the Dark Side is a gripping investigation into the shocking mistreatment of United States’ prisoners of War held in Afghanistan, Iraq and Guantanamo Bay. It is directed by acclaimed documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney, who also made the Oscar nominated Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room.

This disturbing and often brutal film is the most incisive examination to date of the Bush administration’s willingness to undermine human rights in its prosecution of the ‘war on terror’. By probing the torture and death of an innocent taxi driver in 2002 at the Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan, the film exposes a policy of detention and interrogation that condones torture and grants immunity to government officials for crimes against humanity.

Taxi to the Dark Side incorporates never-before-seen images from inside the Bagram, Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay prisons, and interviews with former government officials, interrogators, prison guards, New York Times reporters Tim Golden and Carlotta Gall and the families of tortured prisoners.

In the face of thousands of prisoners passing through the system, an astonishing number of admitted homicides and a hastily drafted law – The Military Commissions Act – Taxi to the Dark Side seeks to ask and answer a key question: what happens when a few men expand the wartime powers of the executive to compromise the very principles on which the United States was founded?

Directed by Alex Gibney
Length: 83 mins