Credits: director of photography: Kirsten Johnson; editor: Jonathan Oppenheim; music: Osvaldo Golijov; producer: Laura Poitras; production: Praxis Films & The Independent Television Service (ITVS);

Country: USA

Year: 2010

Running time: 90

Colour: Colour

Format: HD CAM (HDTV)

As she showed in MY COUNTRY, MY COUNTRY, in which she interviewed a Sunni physician in Iraq, New York-based documentarian Laura Poitras - among the top docmakers anywhere - peers into lives and issues missed by both the mainstream and alternative media. Here she ventures to Sana’a, the unsanitary capitol of Yemen, to speak to Abu Jandal, Osama bin Laden’s former bodyguard and a jihadist; and to sterile Guantanamo, where she is denied direct access to Abu Jandal’s well-known recruit, Salim Hamdan, bin Laden’s ex-driver, now on trial for terrorism. (Denied access to him, she has someone read in voiceover his prison letters.) Abu Jandal is conflicted: He has been “rehabilitated” by a Yemeni government program, but he also expresses ideas sympathetic to Al Qaeda. Now he has reinvented himself as a taxi driver. Poitras keeps the film moving by stressing the tension between these formerly close friends. More non-fiction films should be as beautifully photographed. Howard Feinstein