When I finished work shortly after 8pm on Tuesday, I felt the urge to purge my brain for a while — or at least fill it with something else. The quickest way for me to do that is to see a film so I checked out what was playing at my local nonprofit movie house, the recently re-opened Revue Cinema, a short 10-minute walk from my place. I bought a 6-month membership to the Revue at the Polish Festival back in September, but I hadn’t used it yet. I looked at the card expecting it to be expired, but luckily it’s good ’til the end of the month!

The Hot Docs Festival is on right now (April 17-27), which would normally draw me like a bee to a flower, but I didn’t feel like standing in a big queue tonight and I wanted to use my Revue card.

I read the synopsis to “Taxi to the Dark Side” but hadn’t watched the trailer for the film. When it comes to documentaries, especially, I prefer to keep an element of surprise.

What I was unprepared for was being confronted (over and over again) with the disturbing reality of how easily a person can become a torturer and commit acts of inhumanity in the name of war. Although it is the U.S. soldiers themselves who are asked the morality question in light of prisoner abuse scandals and their own subsequent prosecutions, the documentary implicates the chiefs as well, including President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, as well as generals and other high-ranking officials in the various military campaigns.

The film does not portray the soldiers as sadists, but rather as untrained security personnel given orders to extract information from prisoners with vague interrogation policies and a field manual no one has time to read. Then when the American public gets wind of the tortures inflicted upon the prisoners, those same soldiers are held accountable — not their superiors. They take the fall, which is quite sickening as press conferences show the chiefs in complete denial of the situation when we all well know they are complicit in what’s going on at the military prisons.

The filmmaker Alex Gribney, while sympathetic to the soldiers doing their frontline duty, does not hold back on the imagery of torture in this documentary. (Consider yourselves warned.) Scapegoats or not, they are acting as individuals as well as a military collective. When I said earlier that I wanted to purge my brain, at times during this film my brain was assaulted with more information about the techniques of torture than I’d ever imagined I would learn in 106 minutes. It is not unbearable (I cannot watch a slasher film), but it is very, very uncomfortable to watch.

The taxi in the title refers to the 22-year old Afghani taxi driver who dies in Bagram Prison as a result of severe injuries at the hands of U.S. military police. He never had a trial, and left behind a family who did not know that he’d died in this manner until a New York Times journalist tracked them down. The autopsy given by a military coroner ruled it a homicide on the death certificate, showing trauma in the lower body comparable to getting run over by a bus. It is the death of this man, Dilawar, that is the trigger for the film and its examination of the prisoner abuse at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and Bagram.

“Taxi to the Dark Side” is a compelling documentary, not just for revealing how the U.S. military has employed the use of torture as a tactical device in wartime, but for raising many other questions in the course of the film:

• what constitutes as torture?
• is torture necessary?
• is anyone capable of torture?
• is the U.S. in a justifiable position as morality police?
• is the Geneva Convention applicable to every prisoner of war?

And those are just the questions I can remember. To me, that the hallmark of a good documentary: raising questions as well as attempting to answer them. I hope I haven’t put anyone off seeing this documentary, not all the imagery is brutal. But skip the popcorn this time.