The Oath
Jun 18 - Jun 24, 2010
(Laura Poitras, USA, 2010, 35mm, 96 min)
Academy Award-nominated Laura Poitras (My Country, My Country) provides a spectacular view of the inner-workings of the Al-Qaeda leadership, and a strong political statement. Her images and talent for exact observation make the case for an understanding of people that seems to have been lost in the war against terror.
"You have to understand people in order to recruit them." This is what Abu Jandal, former bodyguard of Osama Bin Laden, says to a group of Yemeni teenagers about his jihadist past. Abu Jandal broke the oath he had sworn as a member of Al-Qaeda and renounced his unconditional obedience to its leadership. The Oath is a portrait of this man and the dramatic, incredible path he has taken on his way to becoming one of the Arab world's most influential critics of the Islamic terror network. At the same time, the story unfolds of Salim Hamdan, Bin Laden's former driver, who was imprisoned at Guantánamo for several years.
"Poitras’s movie digs deep; it hints at the violently conflicting drives that an intelligent human being may be liable to." —The New Yorker
"A documentary that at its start purports to be the tale of two terrorists, the film keeps deepening and widening until it becomes a subtle, stubborn moral drama about users and the used." —Boston Globe
"Just how deep inside Jandal's world Poitras goes is all the more striking given the inherent cultural barriers and danger she faced as a female filmmaker shooting a former Al Qaeda operative in Yemen." —LA Times
Watch the trailer:
