Lakhdar

Kidnapped and taken to Guantánamo Bay by the US military, Lakhdar Boumediène was wrongfully detained and tortured at the notorious prison for seven long years. Now a free man leading a quiet life in Nice, France, Lakhdar embarks on a journey to seek answers for Guantánamo survivors.

An Algerian citizen, Lakhdar was a charitable aid worker for the Bosnian Red Crescent Society in 2001, leading a peaceful life with his family in Sarajevo. In October that year, he was wrongfully accused, with five other Algerians, of plotting a terror attack against the U.S. embassy in Sarajevo.

Kidnapped, shackled, and renditioned to Guantánamo Bay Detention Camp in Cuba, Lakhdar was detained at the notorious U.S. military-run prison between 2002-2009, with no charges ever filed against him.

Lakhdar endured brutal beatings and harsh interrogation sessions. Steadfast in his innocence, he embarked on prolonged hunger strikes to protest his treatment but was subjected to painful force-feeding sessions.

In 2008, Lakhdar accomplished an extraordinary feat. Having never lost faith that he would prove his innocence, he won a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case, Boumediène v. Bush, which ruled that Guantánamo constituted U.S. soil and that detainees have the habeas corpus right to challenge their detention in federal court.

Boumediène v. Bush, in an extraordinary act of recognition by the highest court in the land, found that noncitizen detainees at Guantánamo are afforded the same constitutional protections as American citizens.

In May 2009, Lakhdar was finally reunited with his wife and daughters in France, where they were to be resettled. Their tearful reunion in Paris, though joyous, was also marked by his sorrow at having missed seven precious years of his two young daughters’ lives.

Because of Lakhdar, hundreds of other men detained at Guantánamo began filing their habeas petitions in hopes of gaining their freedom. The name Boumediène has since become synonymous with the principles of justice and due process: Boumediène v. Bush marked a historic legal milestone enshrining the right of non-U.S. citizens to be protected from unlawful and indefinite detention.

Lakhdar now lives in Nice, France with his wife and three younger children, resuming their lives in a quiet village perched along the French Riviera, a short drive from his two older children and grandchildren. Yet Lakhdar’s time at Guantánamo continues to haunt him as its effects have left debilitating scars – and lingering questions as to why the Americans could have ever thought he was a terrorist.

The film is birthed from Lakhdar’s powerful will to tell his incredible story of survival to the world, almost fifteen years after his ordeal. As the man known for winning a Supreme Court case against a sitting U.S. president, Lakhdar knows the immense historical weight his name carries and is determined that there is much he can still do to ensure that Guantánamo’s horrors would never again happen to anyone else.

The documentary steps into Lakhdar’s world: We follow him in present-day Nice as he rebuilds his life, navigates France’s culture and customs, and experiences fatherhood for the second time.

Even after all that he has endured, Lakhdar just wants one thing: An official apology from the U.S. administration, which he hopes will give him a fair chance to clear his name.

As the most enduring manifestation of America’s ‘War on Terror,’ Guantánamo conjures paradoxical sensibilities in collective memory: shock and outrage at its extreme practices, on one hand, and the stubborn conviction that Guantánamo had actually locked up “the worst of the worst,” on the other.

There is an almost amnesiac forgetting of the depth of public and political complicity in justifying Guantánamo’s cruel practices. Many Americans regard Guantánamo as a closed chapter in history, with younger generations having never even heard of Guantánamo.

Recognizing that Guantánamo continues to cast a dark shadow over the many lives it has affected, the film addresses two important questions: What happens to the men released from Guantánamo, or rather, how does one ever adjust to ‘normal’ life after witnessing its horrors? Have cases like Boumediène v. Bush changed American legal and cultural understandings of torture and detention in any meaningful way?

The film’s stakes are no less than ensuring that Guantánamo’s atrocities would never happen to anyone else. As we follow Lakhdar in his life post-Guantánamo and capture his joys and his struggles, we will examine challenging but socially-important issues ranging from the immense physical and psychological effects of torture and the consequences of Islamophobia after 9/11 to whether men like Lakhdar could ever hope for redress – or just an apology – from those responsible for their ordeal.

The film is an urgent reminder of the heavy debt the U.S. still owes people like Lakhdar and their families.