This short film by renowned photographers Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin featuring Ruhal Ahmed, is a meditation on the former detainee’s experience in Guantanemo Bay. For a period of two and a half years he was repeatedly questioned by military staff at the Cuban base, where his interrogators would often play loud music to him repeatedly at high volume, as a form of torture. The film also explores the use of sound on the human body, for both pleasure and pain. It’s a poignant, powerful, timely and emotive piece of work.



It was filmed in the Anechoic Chamber at Cambridge University’s Department of Engineering, a room designed to create total silence. On visiting an Anechoic Chamber, experimental music composer and writer John Cage entered expecting to hear silence, but wrote later, "I heard two sounds, one high and one low. When I described them to the engineer in charge, he informed me that the high one was my nervous systemin operation, the low one my blood in circulation." True silence is impossible.

This is the fifth in a series of seven films commissioned by Massive Attack to accompany their latest album Heligoland. They commissioned some of the most talented independent film directors around to choose a song from the album and produce a short film on their chosen subject to accompany it.

Massive Attack deployed an independently based Twitter initiative to exclusively broadcast the films, creating a dynamic and engaging experience where users log in to the ‘Tweatre’ with their Twitter accounts, navigate the content, and can directly ‘tweet’ about each film from within the platform. The aesthetic visualisation of the site tributes the direction of the artwork and movement of the music and films.

This sentiment driven activity falls in line with the nature and intention of the films, directors and music itself – to spark emotion, passion and thought within viewer’s minds, and provoke a response, one which they can express through a tweet to a global audience.