Guantánamo, torture and friendship: how we made My Brother's Keeper

How did you first discover Mohamedou and Steve?

I first heard about Mohamedou Ould Slahi in December 2014, when my then-Guardian editor, Mustafa Khalili, commissioned me to make a short animated film about [Slahi’s] bestselling memoir, Guantánamo Diary. It was through that project that I met Mohamedou’s attorney, Nancy Hollander, and we later began discussing the possibility of making a longer-term documentary together.

Membership Event: Mohamedou Ould Salahi: A Guantánamo detainee’s fight for freedom

Remarkably, Mohamedou’s book was written and published while he was still a prisoner at Guantánamo. It vividly described his “extraordinary rendition” from his home country of Mauritania to Jordan, Afghanistan and finally Cuba, and the gut-wrenching interrogation and torture that followed (euphemistically dubbed “special measures”). Throughout his 15-year incarceration, Mohamedou was never charged with a crime by US authorities.

Despite this horrendous ordeal, his memoir revealed a compassionate, warm and intellectually rich human being caught in the net of post-9/11 paranoia – someone whose astute understanding of language and prose was not only vividly accessible but also deeply moving.

Mohamedou had expressed an interest in having his first moments of freedom documented on camera, so Nancy invited me to join her in Nouakchott just a few days after he was released in 2016. Mohamedou and I clicked straight away and I had a strong feeling that his post-release journey would be worth exploring. Luckily for me, Mohamedou is a huge fan of cinema (especially Adam Sandler comedies), as well as being an incorrigible showoff, so he was really attracted to the idea of making a documentary.

How did you go about making the documentary? How long did it take in total?

I visited Mohamedou in Mauritania on four trips between 2016-19. On the second occasion, Mohamedou started to open up about his unlikely friendship with his former guard, Steve Wood, and by the following year they had reconnected on Facebook and were planning a reunion in Nouakchott. Mohamedou rang me shortly thereafter and invited me to join them.

I started the edit about a year later, in the spring of 2019, and we went through several iterations over the next 12 months, including a longer cut that featured much more of Mohamedou’s backstory. Crucial to that evolution were my executive producers, Lindsay Poulton and Mustafa Khalili, as well my co-editor, Agnieszka Liggett. They were all instrumental in shaping the final film and helping me to discover its themes and narrative focus.

Lindsay Poulton, the Guardian’s head of documentaries, says: “With Guardian Documentaries, we are always looking for surprising routes into important contemporary stories. Laurence has chosen an interesting lens by which to reflect on Guantanemo, a powerful symbol of the ‘war on terror’. There is plenty to say on the cruelty but to choose instead to celebrate the humanity that can be found even in the darkest corners was a bold decision. Filmmaking is always a collaboration, a push and pull between life and imagination. Mohamedou’s ineffable spirit in life pulled the film in the direction of hope.”

We officially launched the finished film at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2020, but sadly everything was disrupted by Covid-19. However, the film went on to have some success on the virtual festival circuit, playing at 19 international film festivals, winning three awards and was recently Bafta longlisted for British short film.

Why did you feel it was so important to tell his story in this way? And why now?

In the wave of post-9/11 paranoia and fear, Muslims were frequently vilified, stereotyped and misrepresented on screen. Detainees themselves were rarely described as three-dimensional people with universal human rights, or treated as innocent until proven guilty. In this sense, I think Guantánamo was sadly very successful in dehumanising the people it incarcerated.

And yet, unwittingly, Mohamedou and Steve had overcome these huge divides to see one another not as instruments of an ideology but as human beings. In one of our final interviews shortly after their reunion, Mohamedou said: “We transcended all these stereotypes, all this hatred. We didn’t do that after prison, we did that in the darkest of moments. We did that when it mattered most.”

What were the big challenges when making this?

When I met Mohamedou for the very first time, I was meeting a man who was at the end of a terrifying 15-year odyssey. The story of how Mohamedou came to be a prisoner at Guantánamo, and what happened to him while he was there, was dramatic and complex enough to occupy a multipart series, let alone a short film. So from the very beginning I knew that one of our biggest challenges was figuring out how to grapple with so much story in a way that didn’t feel laboured or overwhelming.

The other key challenge was finding a strong active narrative, while also embracing the fact that a crucial piece of the puzzle was obscured in the past – a past where there was virtually no film archive, no “found footage”, and no uncensored photography.

We grappled with this storytelling conundrum for the best part of two years as I continued to go back and visit Mohamedou and his family in Nouakchott. When he told me that he’d been in touch with his former US guard and they were planning a reunion, we realised this active narrative could be the glue that held the story together.

And the highlights?

Certainly one of the highlights of making this film was being with Mohamedou on Nouakchott beach just a few days after he was released in 2016. He suggested we go down to the beach because he hadn’t seen a sunset in over 15 years. That really brought home the shocking nature of his incarceration and how easily we take life’s simple pleasures for granted.

Mohamedou and I were walking along the edge of the sea when he suddenly picked up an unusually shaped rock and launched into an uncanny David Attenborough impression: “You see this? This rock is very rare and is only found here, in Mauritania.” I was laughing so much I couldn’t hold the camera steady. Mohamedou later told me that one of the few DVDs he had access to at Guantánmo was the BBC’s Blue Planet series, and because he’d watched every episode hundreds of times, he’d mastered David’s famous intonation. It was a brilliant example of Mohamedou’s gift for observation, language and humour, and I knew in that moment that I was filming a really special human being.