The Prisoner

The Prisoner is a documentary film about a journalist from Baghdad during the Iraq War who was detained by United States troops in 2003 and later imprisoned for several months. He was suspected of plotting to kill Tony Blair the prime minister of Britain but proved to be innocent. The Prisoner received very high reviews from the critics.

The Prisoner is a wee little movie, only 72 minutes long, and it is very minimalist in approach — three interviews, a little action footage shot by Yunis and Tucker, with comic book cartoons (by co-director Epperlein) filling in the visual gaps in the story (a much more honest approach than using impersonal stock footage and a lot of pompous narration). But this punctiliousness, this refusal to inflate, grants it a large measure of persuasive power. You believe it precisely because it makes no claims it cannot document and, more important, because you imagine yourself in his sandals, trying desperately to prove your innocence to people who have no interest in that topic. — TIME Magazine