In December 2001, the US government was ramping up its “war on terror” and 19-year-old Murat Kurnaz was about to board a plane home from Pakistan to Germany, where the Turkish national had legal residency and lived with his parents in Bremen. Reportedly as a result of the Americans offering “bounties” for suspected terrorists, Kurnaz was arrested and detained in Guantánamo Bay without trial or evidence; he was only released in 2006, as a result of a passionate letter-writing campaign by his formidable mother, Rabiye, culminating in her lawyer taking their case to Washington DC and sensationally submitting a writ of habeas corpus in federal court: Murat Kurnaz v George W Bush.
It is this harrowing true story to which German film-maker Andreas Dresen has given the Hollywoodised feelgood-underdog treatment, concentrating on Murat’s gutsy mum played – often for sentimental laughs – by German-Turkish comedian and TV personality Meltem Kaptan. Her lawyer, Bernhard Docke, is played by veteran Berlin actor Alexander Scheer, very much in the traditional style of the stressed, fallible but idealistic lawyer who gallantly takes up the impossible pro bono case (much like Albert Finney for Julia Roberts in Erin Brockovich).
