BERLIN - It did not take long for the entertainment press to liken British film director Michael Winterbottom's "The Road to Guantanamo" to Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11", a polemic against the Bush administration. Moore won the coveted Palme d'Or in Cannes in 2004 for his documentary about the U.S. response to the Sept. 11 attacks.

Winterbottom's offering is a harsh if one-sided look at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba. "I'm not as big as Michael Moore," Winterbottom joked, when asked for comparisons with the rotund U.S. director. "There are still 500 people in Guantanamo, a lot of them have been there for four years, virtually no-one has received a trial and no-one has been found guilty," said the film maker in an interview. He called for the Cuban prison to be closed, adding: "The idea of the film is to do that, so if I was half as good as Michael Moore at getting publicity I'd be very happy." That publicity was not hard to come by in Berlin, where critics praised his provocative film after its world premiere. "What Michael Moore and his 'Fahrenheit 9/11' did for Cannes ... Michael Winterbottom and his 'The Road to Guantanamo' may have done for the Berlinale: given it a jolt of adrenalin," wrote Variety magazine in its special Berlin edition. The competition films, with a few exceptions, have dealt with weighty issues but lacked the punch of Winterbottom's picture.

The Road to Guantanamo is a blend of interviews, news footage and drama set in Pakistan, Afghanistan and Guantanamo showing how three English Muslims ended up in the military jail as suspected al Qaeda fighters. They were released in 2004. Known in Britain as the "Tipton Three" after the English town where they come from, the young Muslims have accused the U.S. military of torture and of flouting international law by keeping them at Guantanamo for over two years without trial. U.S. journalists at a screening on Tuesday two weeks ago said Americans may find graphic scenes of beating, solitary confinement and mental and physical torture inflicted by U.S. troops disturbing. Winterbottom, who won the Golden Bear in 2003 with another Afghan-related film "In This World", said he wanted to show that detainees at the base were humans, not monsters. "I kind of assumed the people in it were somehow committed terrorists who were extremely dangerous. The whole argument was they were so dangerous they had to create this extra-legal prison," the 44-year-old said. "This is a prison set up in Cuba, because to do what they are doing in America would be illegal. They don't have any of the rights of people in America and at the same time they don't have rights of prisoners of war either," he added. Winterbottom was unsure if the film would find distributors in the United States, but said: "These days if you put it on the Internet, and I think it will go on the Internet, then people in America in theory have access to that." Reuters