The Prisoner or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair

provocative documentary
***1/2

"The Prisoner Or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair" is a movie with one hell of a provocative, eye-catching title. It's only after you figure out what the movie is actually about, however, that you get the full ironic flavor of that title.

This timely documentary chronicles the story of Yunis Khatayer Abbas, a freelance Iraqi journalist who, along with two of his younger brothers, was falsely accused of planning to assassinate the British Prime Minister during one of his official trips to Baghdad. The movie makes it clear that Yunis and his siblings were innocent from the get-go, and that, after serving nine grueling months at sites including the notorious Abu Graib, they were finally released back to their worried families, with a simple muttered "sorry" from the American commanders as sole compensation for the misery they'd suffered.

The story behind the movie is almost as intriguing as the movie itself. Yunis first came to the attention of...

Tragedy of Errors
Facetiously, 'The Prisoner or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair' has playful videos by the beach accompanied to frenetic music that sounds like it comes straight from 'Pulp Fiction'. Despite his ordeal, Iraqi journalist Abbas conveys warmth and humor looking into the camera, spending most of the documentary time being interviewed about his time in Abu Ghraib prison. Never actually told to this day about his crime, he was nevertheless implicated with the tongue-in-cheek title of this revealing film.

Most of the revelations, however, aren't funny. For someone like me who has believed that people have overreacted to the abuses of The Geneva Convention, this movie is an eye-opener. First of all Abbas has been on both sides of the fence. As a journalist and camerman, he was a first hand victim of Uday Hussein's government, imprisoned during a "speech embargo" and subjected to electrical torture in prison. How welcome do the words of President Bush come as a slide show of...

Kafka meets iraq
"The Prisoner" tells the story of Yunis Abbas, an Iraqi cameraman who was arrested along with his brothers in 2003 for planning to kill Tony Blair and spent 9 months in Abu Ghraib before the army released him.

On the surface, we read about stuff like this every day, but the triumph of 'The Prisoner" is not so much the story that it tells, but the way the story is told. For the first time, we are able to see the war from the perspective of a man who could be any of us--a friend, family or a neighbor. Most importantly, Yunis tells his story with a surprisingly sharp sense of humor--his entire tale his paved with black comedy and the film often feels like it came straight off one of Kafka's pages.

I highly recommend this film to anyone seeking a better understanding of the human side of the war beyond the headlines.

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