Taxi to the Dark Side
| Taxi to the Dark Side | |
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Theatrical release poster
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| Directed by | Alex Gibney |
| Produced by | Alex Gibney Eva Orner Susannah Shipman |
| Written by | Alex Gibney |
| Music by | Ivor Guest Robert Logan |
| Edited by | Sloane Klevin |
| Distributed by | THINKFilm |
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Release date
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Running time
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106 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
Taxi to the Dark Side is a 2007 documentary film directed by American filmmaker Alex Gibney, and produced by him, Eva Orner and Susannah Shipman. It won the 2007 Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. It focuses on the December 2002 killing of an Afghan taxi driver named Dilawar, who was beaten to death by American soldiers while being held in extrajudicial detention and interrogated at the Parwan Detention Facility at Bagram air base.
It was part of the Why Democracy? series, which consisted of ten documentary films from around the world questioning and examining contemporary democracy. As part of this series, the documentary was broadcast in over 30 countries from October 8–18, 2007. The BBC showed the film in its Storyville series.
Taxi to the Dark Side examines the USA's policy on torture and interrogation in general, specifically the CIA's use of torture and their research into sensory deprivation. The film includes discussions against the use of torture by political and military opponents, as well as the defense of such methods; attempts by Congress to uphold the standards of the Geneva Convention forbidding torture; and popularization of the use of torture techniques in TV series such as 24.
The documentary background to the death of Dilawar, an Afghan peanut farmer, who gave up farming to become a taxi driver, and who died after several days of beating at Bagram detention center.
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