Rabiye Kurnaz vs. George W. Bush

2022 [GERMAN]

Biography / Comedy / Crime / Drama / History

3
Rotten Tomatoes Critics - Rotten 50% · 6 reviews
IMDb Rating 6.8/10 10 1637 1.6K

Plot summary

Desperate to help her son, Rabiye Kurnaz, a housewife and loving mother from Bremen, goes to the police, notifies authorities and almost despairs at their impotence and in the end, against all the odds, something truly remarkable happens.

Director

Andreas Dresen Photo
Andreas Dresen

Top cast

Christina Große Photo
Christina Große as Ute Docke
Angela Merkel Photo
Angela Merkel as Self
Tim Williams Photo
Tim Williams as Self
Alexander Hörbe Photo
Alexander Hörbe as Wolfgang
720p.BluRay 1080p.BluRay
1.06 GB
1280*536
German 2.0
NR
Subtitles de  
24 fps
1 hr 58 min
Seeds 1
2.19 GB
1920*804
German 5.1
NR
Subtitles de  
24 fps
1 hr 58 min
Seeds 3

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by joana-pedroso15 6 / 10

Not bad but failed to transmit a message of suffering

I read about how this man was tortured in Guantanamo and none of this horror was transmitted in the movie. It was not clear what he had gone to Pakistan to do. Apparently he had just turned 19 yo and wanted to study there but was turned down so spent 2 months as a pilgrim going from mosque to mosque. Why not alternate between footages of his family struggle and what was happening to him so the viewer could get a clear view that he was innocent and hence sympathize more? Futhermore, the mother is depicted as lively and humurous. I failed to see the in the character a suffering mother and the father seemed not to care at all.In the end, she just stood up the lawyer who had been working for them for free for almost 5 years. Also didn't help the viewer sympathize with the main character.Overall the story is good and it had potential to be a movie about human rights, but I think it failed to achieve all that potential and why this case was important.
Reviewed by rfndayitabi 8 / 10

Motherhood vs imperial power

This movie defuses the sensationalisms typical of the great anti-system stories through irony; also it is devoid of the usual knee-jerk anti-americanism of too many euopean fils when they deal with questions in which american policies are less than fair and correct like the twin wars in Afghanistan and Irak. Between the start and the end of Rabiye Kurnaz vs. George W. Bush are highlighted a couple of significant moments, both marked by the faces of two conservative heads of state, visible on the television screen. The first is that of Bush Jr., in the aftermath of the attack on the Twin Towers. The second is that of Angela Merkel, at the time of her election as Federal Chancellor of Germany. The camera seems to frame them in the same way, with the television image ideally replacing the cinematographic one. If the first, Bush jr, returns the figure of otherness, of the one who in the course of the story will be exalted as a symbol and spokesperson for the injustices of the American anti-terrorist system, the second, A. Merkel, takes on an opposite, almost salvific value. Not only for the speed with which the newly elected government corrects the political mistakes of the previous German administration, but for what the wind of change brings for the film's desperate protagonist. She resigned at that moment to the possibility that her son would never return from the Cuban prison of Guantánamo. Inspired by true events, Rabiye Kurnaz vs. George W. Bush recounts the legal (and emotional) odyssey that the Turkish housewife Rabiye Kurnaz (Meltem Kaptan) had to face from 2001 to 2006 to ascertain the innocence of her son, and ensure his return to Germany from the terrible detention. Like many of the Guantánamo detainees of that period, the young Murat had no ties to Al Qaeda or affiliations of any kind to terrorist organizations. His only fault was that he was in Karachi, Pakistan, where some of the terrorists responsible for the attack were staying. An already dramatic situation, which Andreas Dresen however chooses to tell through the canons of comedy. In order to retrace the (extra) ordinariness of the matter, through the most eminently ridiculous emotions and drifts of everyday life. In this sense, the efforts, doubts and frantic battles of Rabiye and her lawyer Bernhard Docke (Alexander Scheer) open up in the eyes of the public as glimpses of everyday life, with all the ensuing repercussions in terms of emotional communication. Seeing a mother's courage in transcending the impossible thus becomes for the spectator the preferential path to empathy, and for the film a way (even a little good-natured and condescending) of defusing the sensationalisms typical of great stories through irony of anti-systemic revenge. And like works like Philomena or Erin Brockovich this film manages to fluidly link the narrative trope of "David vs. Goliath" to the overwhelming charisma of its (however earthy) heroine. If anything, the problem lies in the lightness with which it glosses over the socio-political ramifications behind the battle. In the obsessive propensity to sweeten a more complex and articulated subject than that testified by the images of the story. Also (and above all) with regard to its most critical consequences. Here, only the detail of her is of interest: that is, giving life to the sincere and faithful portrait of a mother, grappling with radical situations that lead her to question the nature of her motherhood.
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