FORMER Guantanamo Bay detainee Moazzam Begg will attend tomorrow's screening of a "revealing and often shocking" new documentary of his life, The Confession (15), at City Screen, York.
Begg and director Ashish Ghadiali will take part in a question-and-answer session from 10.20pm to 11pm after the 8.30pm showing of a film commissioned by BBC Storyville and the BFI and subsequently nominated for the Grand Jury Award at its world premiere at July's Sheffield Doc/Fest.
The Q and A will be hosted by the Lord Mayor of York, Cllr Dave Taylor, City Screen's marketing manager.
From supporting the Bosnian Mujahideen to being imprisoned in Bagram and Guantanamo in the early 2000s; from the rebel training camps in Syria to the prison cells of Belmarsh in Britain, the controversial British Pakistani, from Birmingham, has experienced a generation of conflict.
The Confession is Begg's first-hand account of those experiences, "a chronicle of the rise of modern jihad, its descent into terror and the disastrous reaction of the West" over a decade of escalating tensions in the Middle East.
“I wasn’t anti-state; the state was anti-me,” protests Begg, who states the case for his innocence in his candid interview, explaining that his actions and sympathies were born of curiosity and resistance to Western media.
Echoing the style of interview documentaries The Fog Of War and The Fear Of 13, The Confession's intimate format provides a psychological insight into the complex, often contradictory figure of Begg, "a victim of unprecedented state violence who still professes a degree of support for Islamic jihad".
Tickets can be booked on 0871 902 5726 or at picturehouses.com/cinema/York_Picturehouse
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