The Con­fes­sion: Liv­ing the War on Terror

There’s the feel­ing that with a cus­tomer as slip­pery as Moaz­zam Begg, you might have been bet­ter off get­ting an old pro like an Errol Mor­ris involved as his on-cam­era ques­tion­er. As it is, this fea­ture by Ashish Gha­di­ali lands a few vital punch­es with­out ever real­ly crack­ing through its subject’s implaca­ble, whol­ly unruf­fled sur­face. Not that it is any kind of back­room tri­al or an attempt at a stitch-up, but it does even­tu­al­ly come across as a missed opportunity.

A casu­al­ly attired Begg is sat in front of the cam­era next to a reflec­tive win­dow which sim­u­lates the space of an inter­ro­ga­tion. The film begins with him deliv­er­ing a mono­logue on his life and trav­els, cool­ly explain­ing how he hap­pened to be in the midst of var­i­ous 21^st cen­tu­ry con­flicts and how his repeat­ed incar­cer­a­tion in facil­i­ties such as Bagram and Guan­tanamo Bay were all entire­ly unlaw­ful. He offers his inter­pre­ta­tion of what the west have defined as ​“rad­i­cal Islam”, explain­ing that what many believe to be a call to vio­lence and revenge, he sees as more polit­i­cal­ly benign. He also high­lights the grim psy­cho­log­i­cal tac­tics used by anti-ter­ror­ist enforcers, and claims that once you’re placed under the spot­light, you’re prob­a­bly there for life.

The film works when it just involves Begg telling his sto­ry from his per­spec­tive. It puts the onus on the view­er to deci­pher the details of his ​“con­fes­sion”. Yet the film falls apart in the sec­ond half, shift­ing away from this sim­ple con­ceit to include the reg­u­lar inter­rup­tions of an unseen inter­view­er and archive video footage of Begg being inter­viewed on tele­vi­sion. Any attempt at jour­nal­is­tic objec­tiv­i­ty falls away as the film becomes a pile on. The sub­ject begins to retreat from view, falling back on the calm rhetor­i­cal deflec­tion tac­tics he’s clear­ly spent years perfecting.

For a film like this, nuance is every­thing, and as soon as it begins to feel like its mak­ers are push­ing an agen­da or search­ing for spe­cif­ic rev­e­la­tions, it becomes far less engag­ing. The title infers that Begg has final­ly opened up about his activ­i­ties span­ning the last twen­ty years, but the oppo­site is true. It’s still an instruc­tive work which offers plen­ty of on-the-ground detail of how bod­ies such as the Tal­iban and Al Qae­da oper­ate, but Begg him­self is intro­duced as a mys­tery and leaves as an enigma.