watch me if you can: the lives of others (2006)/the road to guantanamo (2006)/the counterfeiters (2007)

It is disquieting when a movie makes you stop, even for a teeny-weeny bit, and think. It is even more unsettling when it impacts you in such a way that your perception of the view from your window is changed. But what makes these experiences amazing is when you are not expecting them.

Dramatist Georg Dreyman and his longtime companion actress Christina-Maria Sieland live in East Germany. It was the 1980s and the socialist state is into eavesdropping to check on their subjects' loyalty, particularly that of the intellectual set. What happens when the stringent secret service agent assigned to sound out the couple becomes more and more drawn into the couple's lives. This is the premise of The Lives of Others.

In Road to Guantanamo, a feature/documentary film, Pakistani Britons, Ruhad Ahmed, Asif Iqbal and Shafiq Rasul and another friend, Monir, travelled to Pakistan in 2001 for a wedding. On an impulse, they crossed the border to Afghanistan which was then being besieged by the US military and its allied forces in retaliation to the 9/11 terrorist attacks. They were trapped in Kunduz which was, apparently, the last stand of the Al-Qeda terrorist network. During a raid by the Northern Alliance fighters they could not find Monir. They were captured and sent to the American naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba for interrogation and never-ending torture. Thet were released five years later without charge. The wedding saw the light of day but Monir did not. He was never seen again.

Another film based on a true story is The Counterfeiters. It describes the largest counterfeiting operation in history, ran by the Nazis during World War II. Salomon "Sally" Sorowitsch lives in Berlin and is notortiously known as the king of counterfeiters. One night, after a night of drinking, gambling and women, as usual, he was arrested by an officer. He was thrown into a concentration camp and was later hand-picked by the same arresting officer, who had become the top man in the camp, to oversee the Nazis' counterfeiting operation manned by other essentially skilled Jews. Although Sally knows that the operation is aimed at funding both Nazi warfare and the pockets of Nazi officers, he will save lives in the camp if he lends his talent for Nazi profit, starting with his own.

These movies affected me more cerebrally than emotionally. Scenes of injustice, agony and death did tug at the heart but also they picked on the brain. It made me mull over my own moral beliefs, personal truths and humanity in general. These are big concepts I know but, really, when do we pause for a while to try to be more aware, more awake. For if concepts such as these are for other people, then what are we here for?