Four unique encounters with Guantanamo construct the multi-faceted mirror that The Guantanamo Trap holds up to each of us. In August 2006, Murat Kurnaz was released from the US detention camp in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. He had been detained for five years, without trial. In the same year, Matthew Diaz, Judge Advocate for the Navy was sentenced to six months of imprisonment for passing on the names of the detainees to a human rights organisation. Four years earlier, in 2002, Judge Advocate Diane Beaver was also deployed in Guantanamo. Here, she became the author of a legal memorandum that would later be nicknamed, ‘The Torture Memo.’ Seven years later, in March 2009, Spanish lawyer Gonzalo Boye leads a criminal case against six former Bush administration officials for allegedly covering up the torture of inmates in Guantanamo Bay.

In the free-falling of a lawless space beyond the Geneva Convention, beyond International jurisdiction – notions of good and evil, right and wrong lose their meaning. Scattered in between revealing interviews and footage from the past are scenes that capture the now-hollow lives of the protagonists. Unable to let go of the past and forge a gratifying future, Kurnaz, Beaver, Diaz and Boye are immobilized by the weight of history. This haunting documentary questions the gravity of morality when decisions are made swiftly and sometimes arbitrarily.

The Guantanamo Trap ripples with a sense of frozen movement. The real-life characters repeatedly try to push forward while their history and their decisions restrain them. The caged freedom transcends the sharp words of the storytellers and moves into the silent landscapes and the nervous, lonely moments that pass through the film. No one escapes Guantanamo unscathed. Not the law, nor morality – and certainly not the people. The film tells the story of the people and depicts their search for a life after Guantanamo.