Robert Geisendörfer Preis 2022

Audience Award
Al Jazeera Documentary Filmfestival
in Sarajevo 2021

In 2004, while on a bus trip close to the Macedonien border, German citizen Khaled El Masri disappeared. He was kidnapped by the CIA and taken to a secret prison near Kabul. Five months later, he was released in a forest in Albania. El Masri was an innocent man. His case was the main reason why the CIA’s worldwide “rendition programme” came to light. Its agents were forcibly taking suspected terrorists to secret locations and torturing them in order to extract confessions and obtain information. It then became clear that ever since the attacks on September 11, moral categories within the US intelligence services had shifted and that the extent of violence used during the CIA operations was out of control. With the support of human rights lawyers in Europe and the United States, El Masri spent the years after his abduction trying to restore his moral and legal integrity and to obtain a formal apology – so far in vain. In September 2020, he made a statement in the extradition procedure against Julian Assange, regarding the question how wikileaks contributed to revealing US war crimes in Afghanistan. In this political thriller, we tell the story of a man who fell victim to a government intervention and was caught up in geopolitical power interests that eventually destroyed his and his family’s life.