Beneath the Blindfold: an inspiring documentary on torture and rehabilitation

Editor’s Note: Beneath the Blindfold, a documentary by Ines Sommer and Kathy Berger, follows the stories of four survivors of torture as they rebuild their lives. We were given the unique opportunity to screen the film. More information is available at the film’s website on events and screenings.  

It’s difficult to identify the feeling you have as Beneath the Blindfold closes. The directors provide updates from the four people we’ve met in the last hour. And afterwards, what is it…? Hope? Melancholy? Empathy? The four stories, the four survivors of torture we meet during this one-hour documentary, are very different but their stories invoke similar complex emotions. But above all, we are left with an undeniable admiration for these four individuals, who, after unmitigated traumas arising from torture, are able to move forward through rehabilitation and rebuild their lives.

Beneath the Blindfold is an undaunted exploration of not only the experiences of the cruelties of torture, but more significantly, how people can move forward afterward. We meet Blama, a former child soldier from Liberia who, at the beginning of the film, cannot eat solid food because he was once forced to drink a toxic substance that destroyed his esophagus;  Matilde, who was raped and tortured in Guatemala because she, a doctor, was treating indigenous people; Donald, a former US Navy officer, who was detained and tortured by US authorities after reporting illegal weapons transactions in Iraq while he worked as a private security contractor; Hector, who was detained and tortured as a college student in Colombia, now uses art to confront his past.

These individual stories, though different in the details and personal experiences of the survivors, nonetheless all echo similar themes. Torture, regardless of the methods by which it is inflicted, destroys an individual’s dignity. Their trust in humanity is shattered. Few of them can continue in their professions, and every day is a challenge to avoid flashbacks to their brutal experiences.

“You feel as though you’re nothing,” Hector says in recalling his experience in Colombia. “These people can do anything to you… no one can do anything. You’ve never felt so lonely.”

And yet, the viewer is left with not only a sadness that these are commons experiences in this world (we are reminded early on in the film that torture is practiced in a majority of the world’s countries, including in the U.S. where all of the survivors depicted currently live). Instead, I was overwhelmed by the bravery and enduring hopefulness of these four survivors, who, despite these circumstances, move forward with their lives – starting new relationships, making new friends, using their experiences as a basis for anti-torture activism, and helping others like them regain their lives. Hector, for example, has a theatre, dance and therapy group with LA-based Program for Torture Victims. Matilde and her husband march in the streets against the US torture program and the military actions in Iraq. Blama, who faced intensive physical rehabilitation to rebuild his digestive system, now in turn wants to help others and is studying to be a nursing assistant and later a registered nurse. Donald continues his legal challenges against the US government to bring perpetrators to justice.

Their family members can see their bravery. Hector’s son says at one point that when he realised his father had been tortured, he actually felt proud. “He was able to take this horrible experience, and use it. Use it to show people how bad torture is. “

Matilde publically speaks out about her torture to a crowd of activists marching against the Iraq war and the US torture program. “The more you share your story,” her husband Jim tells her, “they can see something very deep and strong in you, and they just know what you’re a survivor.”

And while the story progresses, the survivors – and the viewer – can see that too, as we “accompany a survivor on their path to healing,” as Mary Fabri, director of torture treatment services at Heartland Alliance Kovler Center, an IRCT member, put it in the film.

While always a dark and troubling subject, a documentary about torture is not without hope. Instead, the enduring feeling after watching Beneath the Blindfold is admiration – the survivors of torture shown in this film move on and rebuild their lives.

By Tessa, Communications Officer at IRCT

A lacking debate

With a Republican VP running-mate finally named, the countdown to the U.S. election begins. But with only 85 days remaining, there is a glaring lack of debate on human rights and torture in America.

Pvt 1st Class Bradley Manning has been accused of provided the largest leak of state secrets in US history. The government’s treatment of Manning, particularly during eight months of detention at Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia, has been called torture by the UN’s chief torture investigator.

In the United States and beyond, newspapers are being filled with the ongoing policy discussions related to the U.S. presidential election. With less than three months to go, however, next to nothing has been said about America’s ongoing problem with torture.

Just this weekend, candidate Mitt Romney announced his choice for a vice-presidential running mate; it’s Paul Ryan, a Republican representative from Wisconsin and a “fiscal policy wonk”, as he’s most consistently described. It’s a pretty clear signal — this election is about the economy and the diverging ideologies of how to remove the U.S. from the ongoing recession.

And lost within these debates on domestic and economic policy is any discussion on torture, or other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment in the U.S.; the 80,000 prisoners detained in long-term solitary confinement, the rendition and torture programme of the Bush years, or the particular case of Bradley Manning.

Manning, 24, who is accused of supplying the largest leak of state secrets in U.S. history to Wikileaks, was detained for more than eight months in conditions his lawyers describe as a “flagrant violation” of his rights, in a motion published this Friday.

According to the motion, Manning was subject to “cruel and unusual” treatment in military detention. He was forced to remain awake every day from 5:00 to 22:00, during which he could not lay down or lean against a wall or other support – “he had to sit upright on his rack without any back support”, his lawyer writes. Manning was also only permitted 20 minutes outdoors a day; any time outside of his cell he was forced to wear leg and arm restraints.

Following a 14-month investigation, UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Juan Mendez described the treatment of Manning as torture.

These are also issues that also need to be addressed and raised during the next 85 days. When the media has gone so far as to debate a candidate’s treatment of his pet during the 1980s, and not yet raise the issue of torture, it’s a depressing sign of America’s depleted authority on human rights.

Let’s finally have this proper debate on torture in the U.S. So let these candidates know that we want them to tell us about their views – on long-term solitary confinement, on cruel treatment of Bradley Manning, and on impunity of those involved in the US rendition and torture programme. Ask them on Facebook, Twitter and townhall meetings.

Tessa, a US citizen living in Denmark, is Communications Officer at the IRCT.