Powerless (2007)

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Movie
German title Powerless
Original title Rendition
Country of production United States , South Africa
original language English
Publishing year 2007
length 121 minutes
Age rating FSK 16
JMK 14
Rod
Director Gavin Hood
script Kelley Sane
production Steve Golin ,
Marcus Viscidi
music Paul Hepker ,
Mark Kilian
camera Dion Beebe
cut Megan Gill
occupation

Powerless (original title: Rendition ) is an American-South African thriller from 2007 . Directed by Gavin Hood and written by Kelley Sane .

action

The film shows two interwoven storylines for the periods of one week before and after a terrorist attack in which 19 people died on a marketplace in a North African country. The first storyline after the attack is about the American traveler Anwar El-Ibrahimi, the police chief Abasi Fawal, who was actually the target of the attack, the agent Douglas Freeman and the wife El-Ibrahimi who stayed at home, her old friend and high-ranking American politician. The second storyline, which actually takes place before the terrorist attack, is about Fatima, the daughter of the police chief and her friend Khalid, who becomes an assassin. Only towards the end is the terrorist attack shown again in more detail and the interweaving of the storylines dissolved.

Before the explosion

Fatima, a student and daughter of the conservative police chief Abasi Fawal, rebelled against her father, who had already chosen her future husband . She stayed with her father's sister, who never married. But she had to be out of the house for six days because of work and could not take care of Fatima. For some time now, Fatima had been secretly meeting with her fellow student Khalid, a calligraphy artist and secret Islamist. His brother was killed in prison. When the preacher in his backyard mosque was arrested while preparing for a demonstration, the planned attack on Abasi was brought forward and Khalid was selected as the assassin. The ignorant Fatima spent one night with him, but in the morning he is already gone. She found a deposited album in memory of Khalid's brother. On the last pages there are pictures of her father, her family and herself. This made the planned assassination clear to her. She ran to the place where her father goes to a café almost every day. There she saw Khalid get out of a car wearing an explosive vest and head towards her father. She stood in his way and asked him not to do so, since he was her father. Khalid's friends in the car saw the terrorist attack as threatened and shot him, but they did not hit immediately. Fatima knelt down to the dying man who finally let go of the hand grenade-like detonator and thus triggered the explosion. The police chief ran away after the first misplaced shot. An American agent who was to be the future contact of the CIA was fatally injured in a car parked at the square. The analyst Douglas Freeman, who sat next to him, then temporarily took over his post.

After the explosion

The from Egypt originating engineer Anwar El-Ibrahimi came at the age of 14 years in the United States, has a green card and lives there with his son Jeremy and his pregnant American wife Isabella. He is on his way back to Chicago from a conference in South Africa . During a farewell, El-Ibrahimi missed a call without transferring the number and called his wife at the next opportunity. She is happy about the long-awaited call from her husband, but had not called him.

El-Ibrahimi is considered highly suspicious after the attack and is picked up by the CIA while transferring at the airport , arrested, interrogated for the first time and - as part of an extraordinary extradition - sent to a prison outside the United States without charge . When he doesn't arrive at the airport as agreed and doesn't answer, his wife begins to investigate. He appears to have boarded but never arrived, but his credit card was charged during the flight. She turns to her old college friend Alan Smith, who is now working for a senator in Washington . During his research, Smith quickly came across the CIA, and there in particular Corrine Whitman, the head of the American counter-terrorism unit that ordered El-Ibrahimi's arrest, on walls of silence. Whitman merely tells him that the CIA has the legitimation to detain El-Ibrahimi because the wanted Islamist Rashid Silime called his cell phone.

Meanwhile, police chief Abasi Fawal initiates the torture of El-Ibrahimi, as he has not yet provided any information and instead stiffly and firmly claims that he does not know Rashid. The young CIA analyst Douglas Freeman takes part in the torture as an observer. The brutal torture soon weighs heavily on him. The harder the torture methods become, the more El-Ibrahimi protests his innocence - until he realizes that he can only survive if he provides information. It doesn't matter if these are true or false.

Isabella is desperate when Smith tells her that he can't help her anymore. He has received instructions from his manager not to risk his career for “this story”. Therefore, Smith advises Isabella to consult a lawyer. In her helplessness, she tries to get Corrine Whitman to make a statement personally, but is quickly brushed aside when she intercepts it before one of their meetings.

Freeman's concerns about the El-Ibrahimi case grow when he realizes that the El-Ibrahimi case was merely providing misinformation. Therefore Freeman secretly enforces the release of the prisoner with the help of the interior minister of the north African country and organizes his escape via Spain back to the United States. His superiors in the United States only find out about this through the press . Eventually El-Ibrahimi returns to Chicago to join his family as a free man.

The police chief's sister confesses to Abasi Fawal that his daughter has been missing for six days and can only give him the first name of Fatima's friend. A friend of Khalid's arrested by the police while preparing for a demonstration is being interrogated. A photo of Fatima and Khalid is found on his cell phone. Under torture, he reveals Khalid's home address. Abasi Fawal rushes there, but only finds the grandmother praying in front of Khalid's picture as an Islamist martyr, who tells him that her grandson died a week ago. Abasi Fawal suddenly realizes that the blurred young woman who tried to stop the suicide bomber on a video that was accidentally recorded by a tourist during the bombing must have been his daughter who has since disappeared. He brings the news of the death of their daughter to his wife.

background

production

The film was shot in Anaheim , Los Angeles , Washington, DC , Cape Town ( South Africa ) and Marrakech and Essaouira ( Morocco ). Filming began on November 13, 2006. It had its world premiere on September 7, 2007 at the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival . The widespread release began on October 19, 2007 in the United States, Great Britain and Canada and on November 22, 2007 in Germany. The film was an estimated budget of 27.5 million US dollars available. The film grossed approximately $ 9.7 million in United States cinemas through November 15, 2007. He already made over 4 million US dollars on the opening weekend. By the end of November 2007, almost 38,500 visitors were counted at the German box office.

Real background of the movie

The film company Warner Bros. itself gives the following statement on the problem addressed in the film:

Gavin Hood (director of the Oscar-winning “ Tsotsi ”) dares with his rousing thriller into the gray area between left and right, right and wrong, without having any simple answers: He throws a provocative spotlight on the complicated effects of what is called “extraordinary rendition ”(“ extraordinary extradition ”, transfer into lawlessness) known US policy: As part of this process, non-Americans who are considered a threat to national security are kidnapped and interrogated in secret prisons outside the United States.

The film takes up a current practice of extraordinary rendition , the transfer of terror suspects to third countries in order to obtain important information there through torture , of the US foreign services , which among other things were carried out by prisoners following the Afghanistan and Iraq Invasions of the United States, at least for the US-owned detention center Guantanamo Bay , a US military base in Cuba , has gained some prominence in the western media. The US has repeatedly emphasized that the so-called "extraordinary extraditions" abroad are not a matter of US constitutional territory, so that the fundamental rights of the US constitution cannot be used, nor are prisoners of war, so that At least from the self-image of the United States, the requirement to apply the Geneva Convention was not given. However, this clearly contradicts Article 5 of the Convention on the Treatment of Prisoners of War. The press repeatedly referred to such almost contactless imprisonment of those affected with the linguistic image “black hole”.

In the context of extraordinary renditions, it came up even at the highest levels of the EU, in particular because of the air movements involved and the people transported with them. There are strong indications of corresponding US warehouses in Poland and Romania. There are also indications of such transfers or the almost equivalent, intensive participation of the United States in the detention of people in prisons in third countries, such as in the case of the German-Syrian citizen Muhammad Haidar Zammar . Ultimately, the US authorities have the option of declaring any foreigner an enemy fighter in order to gain greater scope for action.

criticism

Roger Ebert wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times on October 19, 2007 that the film - which explores the theory and practice of torture and personal responsibility - is precious and rare. It is an "intelligent", "important", "sovereign" and "effective" thriller.

Todd McCarthy wrote in Variety magazine on Sept. 10, 2007 that even the inspired Reese Witherspoon, who can give a spark to simple characters and nonsensical scripts, could do little more than look for different ways to look concerned. There is more “juice” in the representations of the Arab characters, especially in that of Omar Metwally.

David Nusair wrote on Reel Film Reviews that the screenwriter was effective in balancing different characters and storylines. The film is not the thought provoking drama that the director clearly intended. There are still captivating moments.

The Lexicon of International Films says: "A solid and well-intentioned, but simplistic film on a sensitive topic."

Awards

Gavin Hood won the 2007 Mill Valley Film Festival 's film award in the “Audience Award for narrative feature” category for this film .

At the Teen Choice Awards 2008 , Reese Witherspoon and Jake Gyllenhaal were nominated for Best Actor in a Motion Picture Drama , but Keira Knightley had to surrender for her performance in apology and Channing Tatum for his acting performance in Stop-Loss .

The German Film and Media Assessment FBW in Wiesbaden awarded the film the rating particularly valuable.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Age rating for powerless . Youth Media Commission .
  2. ↑ Locations according to the Internet Movie Database
  3. ↑ a b c d budget and box office results according to the Internet Movie Database
  4. ↑ a b Start dates according to the Internet Movie Database
  5. ↑ boxofficemojo.com. Retrieved November 25, 2007
  6. ↑ MACHTLOS - From November 22nd in the cinema with Reese Witherspoon, Jake Gyllenhaal, Meryl Streep, Alan Arkin and Peter Sarsgaard ( Memento from February 12th 2013 in the web archive archive.today )
  7. ↑ http://www.n-tv.de/677309.html (link not available)
  8. ^ "Several EU countries have accepted and covered up CIA abductions" , Telepolis , Peter Nowak February 15, 2007
  9. ^ "Secret prison of the CIA in Poland or Romania?" , Telepolis , Florian Rötzer, November 3, 2005
  10. ^ "Zammar Case: Government Knows About Torture in Syria" , Tagesschau , January 24, 2008
  11. ↑ “Foreigners in the United States can be declared enemy fighters” , Telepolis , Florian Rötzer, November 22, 2006
  12. ^ Film Review , Chicago Sun-Times , Roger Ebert , October 19, 2007
  13. ^ Film Review ( Memento October 11, 2007 in the Internet Archive ), Variety , Todd McCarthy , September 10, 2007
  14. ^ Film Critics , Reel Film Reviews , David Nusair , 2007, accessed September 17, 2007
  15. ^ Journal film-dienst and Catholic Film Commission for Germany (eds.), Horst Peter Koll and Hans Messias (ed.): Lexikon des Internationale Films - Filmjahr 2007 . Schüren Verlag, Marburg 2008. ISBN 978-3-89472-624-9
  16. ↑ a b Nominations and awards according to the Internet Movie Database