In The Road to Guantanamo, codirectors Michael Winterbottom and Mat Whitecross recount the true story of four British Muslim men who go to Pakistan for a wedding and end up in Cuba as tortured prisoners of the U.S. government. This powerful docudrama masterfully combines edge-of-your-seat storytelling (the spectacular early scenes were filmed in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iran) with the sickening realism of torture in a military prison. At the same time, the film avoids simple sensationalism and the demonization of individual soldiers, instead leaving Bush, Blair, and Rumsfeld holding the buck for blatantly trampling all over the Geneva Convention and denying prisoners their most fundamental human rights. In Camp X-Ray, which is the first holding block for detainees, the men are locked in open-air cells resembling dog kennels. Not allowed to talk to one another, exercise, touch the wire of their cages, or protect themselves from the hot sun, they are woken up every hour for a head count. They are interrogated by CIA, FBI, and military personnel, and beaten in order to extract confessions stating that they are al-Qaeda fighters. The most diabolical of all the tortures consists of their being tied up in stress positions to the floors of their cells while they are blasted with ear-splitting music. The directors never hide their political intentions, but they have responded to critics who have called the film a work of propaganda by stating that they were not making a piece of investigative journalism, but simply wanted to tell this gripping story from the point of view of those who lived through it.