Diabolical story of Gitmo prisoner is brought to life in 'The Mauritanian'

It's a sweltering day, late January 2020, as a van of journalists arrives at the Mistico Equestrian Centre in the winelands outside Paarl, 40 minutes' drive from Cape Town. The journalists — a motley crew of entertainment hacks from Cape Town, Joburg, Italy and the UK — aren't here to feed the equine beauties. We're here to marvel at the terrifying recreation of the notorious US detention site in Cuba's Guantanamo Bay. Complete with guard towers, towering metal fences and signs that warn that it's a restricted area — no photos permitted and harming the iguanas earns you a $10,000 fine — it's as close as those of us fortunate enough to never have to see the real Guantanamo can imagine.

BIG-NAME CAST

South African extras dressed in US military fatigues stand in what little shade is available and wait for their next scene. We're taken on a tour of the set of the film, initially titled Prisoner 760 but which releases in cinemas this week as The Mauritanian. We're briefly introduced to a smiling, sunburnt Scott, Kevin Macdonald, the Oscar-winning documentary director of One Day in September and the acclaimed director of feature dramas like The Last King of Scotland and State of Play.

As we wait in the shade to get some relief from the searing heat, two women walk past — one, young, auburn-haired and tall, the other older, shorter with a platinum blonde bob. "I hope you guys are wearing sunscreen and drinking plenty of water," says the blonde before moving on to take her place in front of the camera. We realise that she's two-time Oscar winner Jodie Foster, accompanied by her co-star Shailene Woodley.

We're taken to the shade of an awning at the back of the set to wait for our interviews with Foster and Woodley, and deal with the overwhelming boredom that's the reality of life on filmsets for those not involved in their production. The publicist tells us we've arrived too late to speak to the other big-name star of the film — Benedict Cumberbatch, who's shot his scenes and gone back to the UK, though he continues to have a keen interest in the film, which he's producing through his production company Sunny March.

Cumberbatch plays US prosecutor Stuart Crouch — devout Christian and rightwing Republican, close friend of the pilot of the hijacked plane that smashed into the South Tower on 9/11, and who resigned from his job after protesting the US's use of enhanced interrogation techniques on detainees at Guantanamo.

We've also narrowly missed meeting the real star of the show, who was on set a few weeks earlier and charmed the hell out of everyone he met, all of whom are only here because of their dedication to bringing to screen the diabolical things that happened to him at the real Guantanamo, where he was held by the US government as Prisoner 760 for over 14 years.

TIES TO AL-QAEDA

Mohamedou Salahi was born in the north-west African desert country of Mauritania in 1970. The ninth child of a camel herder father, Salahi was an exceptionally bright young man who became the first person in his family to attend university when he won a scholarship to study engineering in Duisburg, Germany, in 1988. Over the next decade Salahi would flirt with radical Islam, fighting with al-Qaeda in its battle with the Russians in Afghanistan.

His cousin, Abu-Hafs al-Mauritani, became the poet and spiritual adviser of al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden. Though no longer involved in the organisation, Salahi kept occasional contact with his cousin, who'd sometimes phone him from Bin Laden's satellite phone, asking him to help send money to his ailing father and family in Mauritania. Salahi returned to Germany to continue his studies and sometimes served as an Islamic preacher at various mosques there.

A HOME IN GUANTANAMO

After a series of coincidental interactions with some jihadists, including men who'd later form part of the team that carried out the attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001, Salahi found himself back in Mauritania, after a few years in Canada. He was arrested shortly after the 9/11 attacks and in July 2002 was "kidnapped" by Jordanian intelligence services and renditioned to Afghanistan, where he spent two weeks before arriving at Guantanamo Bay in August 2002.

This would be his home for the next 14 years. There, he'd suffer repeated torture at the hands of US military interrogators who didn't believe the account of his interactions with al-Qaeda and viewed him as a most high-level detainee. Eventually Salahi, exhausted and broken from interrogations, told a made-up story he hoped would satisfy them.

He was rewarded by receiving some comforts — a pillow and later a DVD player, on which
he watched films like The Big Lebowski. He estimates he watched it over 80 times in different languages and can recite each line, including all the songs on the soundtrack. The films also helped Salahi to learn English and a series of other languages for which his polymath curiosity gave him a natural knack.

By the time lawyers got involved in his case, Salahi had already been in detention at Guantanamo with no contact with family or the outside world for almost 10 years. In 2010 his case was reviewed and he was granted release by a US judge who believed he'd been wrongfully detained and that the confessions he'd made were unreliable, having been obtained using torture. The Obama administration appealed the decision, dashing Salahi's hopes of freedom — he found himself living in more relaxed conditions but still under US custody in Guantanamo until 2016, when he was finally released and returned to Mauritania.

Salahi's story was told in his words with the release of the diary of his detention compiled for his lawyers in 2015. Savagely redacted by the US government, Guantanamo Diary still became a bestseller and the first memoir of a Guantanamo detainee to be published while its author was still held there. A 2019 New Yorker article by Ben Taub about Salahi and his relationship with his prison guard Steve Wood won a Pulitzer prize last year.

INJUSTICES REVEALED

Later Macdonald tells us that the real Mohamedou is incredibly charismatic: "He charmed everyone on the crew wearing his traditional Mauritanian dress. He's funny and incredibly film literate ... He came to set and sang the call to prayer in one scene. He was very moved by that." Foster, during a hastily grabbed interview between scenes, recalls that when her real-life character Nancy Hollander came to the set with Salahi, "It was a treat to see [them] together. It was the first time he'd been out of Mauritania since being released — a big deal. They were like an old married couple — he's always trying to antagonise and she rolls her eyes." French actor Tahar Rahim, who plays Salahi in the film, says, "When I met him for real, I couldn't talk, I just listened. What can you say?"

For Rahim, dressed in his orange jumpsuit, playing Salahi came with a certain responsibility. He's telling Salahi's story and wants him to be happy. "I don't want him to feel betrayed."

Woodley, who plays lawyer Teri Duncan, says the film offers an opportunity to make US audiences realise that the story's not just about Mohamedou. "There are hundreds of people who've been through similar experiences. For my own political reasons I hope it makes a difference to policy and to the way Americans view aspects of interrogation and our judicial system ... there's a lot of justice to be found in his journey."

Of course, when I spoke to her, Donald Trump was still US president, the coronavirus hadn't forced us into the protective prisons of our homes and cinemas were ticking along as usual.

SEEING LIGHT AND DARKNESS

Rahim finishes his cigarette and gets back to work. He'll be hooded and confronted by shouting actors in military fatigues with barking German shepherds in a simulation of the enhanced interrogation techniques used at the real Guantanamo. He says that when audiences see the film he wants them to see more than an Arab Muslim guy in jail. "I want them to see a human being, not an image or piece of paper but somebody who could be their family, someone innocent — so they understand that the rule of law must be respected for everyone."

For Macdonald, the focus of the film is the humanising of a man who many Americans disregard as an enemy. He tells us, between preparing for shots in a recreated Gitmo medical centre, that it's a tough subject for the US. "The aim of this film is to portray Salahi as not just a brown person in an orange jumpsuit, but as an intelligent, warm, sympathetic person who's been through hell."

Foster hopes that audiences will experience what he's experienced. "I want people to have compassion — put themselves in his skin, because it could happen to any of us if we lived in a place with a compromised democracy."

As the sun relents a little it's time to leave Guantanamo Paarl and head back to the city. A group of extras in orange jumpsuits arrive for their scenes. A hipster undoes his top knot and grabs a moment to perform his afternoon prayer before donning a black hood to face the barking dogs. A large muscled extra in a military uniform watches him during his smoke break. I think of the verse by Iraqi poet Ahmed Matar that Salahi writes in his book, often gave him solace: "I stood in my cell/ Wondering about my situation/ Am I the prisoner, or is it that guard standing nearby/ Between me and him stood a wall/ In the wall, there was a hole/ Through which I see light, and he sees darkness/ Just like me he has a wife, kids, a house/ Just like me he came here on orders from above."

• 'The Mauritanian' releases in cinemas on March 19.