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Sept. 21, 2007
Documenting the horrific
Paperny turns his lens on torture victim William Sampson.
KATHARINE HAMER EDITOR
In nearly 25 years as a journalist and documentary filmmaker, David
Paperny has covered topics as harrowing as the Holocaust, AIDS and
the black market trade in human organs. The many complex characters
he has profiled include Mordecai Richler, Henry Morgentaler and
Samuel Bronfman. And yet, he says he has "never worked as hard
to tell a story" as he did while directing his latest film,
Confessions of an Innocent Man.
The feature-length documentary, which premièred at the Montreal
World Film Festival in August and will screen at the Vancouver International
Film Festival next month, relays the ordeal of William Sampson –
a Canadian citizen arrested, tortured and held in solitary confinement
in Saudi Arabia for two-and-a-half years.
"This was a very challenging project," Paperny conceded
in a recent interview with the Independent. Among his key
challenges: winning Sampson's trust. "He was very hesitant,
at first, to give up control of his story to me," Paperny said.
"He is a colorful and challenging man to work with. He expects
a lot, demanded a lot and [it] took a lot of time for me to gain
his confidence – and his story, as it unravelled in front of
my cameras, was clearly more complex than I ever imagined."
At the time of his arrest in Riyadh in December 2000, Sampson was
working as a business consultant. Along with several other western
expatriates, he spent his evenings drinking and partying in a country
governed by Islamic law, where alcohol consumption is strictly forbidden.
Sampson and three of his friends, Sandy Mitchell, Les Walker and
Raf Schyvens, were picked up in the wake of a car bombing that killed
a British engineer. Defenders of the men assert that the Saudis
were trying to cover up any hint of homegrown terrorism by pointing
the finger at western outsiders.
In the book upon which this film is based, and to Paperny's cameras,
Sampson details the repeated, severe beatings he sustained during
the time he was incarcerated. In early 2001, a videotape of Sampson
and his friends "confessing" to the bombing was broadcast
live on Saudi television. The following year, Sampson was sentenced
to death by beheading during a secret trial. But he refused to give
in to the guards who tortured and threatened him. He staged a months-long
protest in which he refused to wear clothing, wash himself or co-operate
with his captors in any way.
Part of the difficulty in telling Sampson's story was that, "he's
not the most likeable person," said Paperny. "In my mind,
he's in part a hero, in how he stood up to the Saudis and fought
back, but on the other hand, he was doing things in Saudi Arabia
that he shouldn't have been doing, so he's not a classic, innocent
victim, which makes the story more interesting as a filmmaker, but
also more difficult to tell. I was determined that viewers should
be sympathetic and understanding of what happened to Bill Sampson,
but I also didn't want to candy-coat the kind of character he was,
even before he got into trouble, because that explains the unusual
route he took in fighting back."
Paperny underlined the fact that Sampson, "[a] Canadian boy
who graduated from St. George's [school] in our town, became caught
up quite inadvertently in this whole shift that the world has taken
since 9/11, in this war on terror that we're facing. He was one
of its early victims, because he was used as a pawn in an international
game of politics and he was a scapegoat for the Saudis, who refused
to admit they had an al Qaeda terrorist problem within their own
country, nine months before 9/11 even occurred, so he was personally
caught up in the defining historical events of the 21st century,
this rise of Islamic extremist terrorist movement and our reaction
to it."
That reaction, according to Paperny, also encompasses the "murky
world" of Abu Ghraib, Guanatanamo Bay and the case of another
Canadian citizen, Maher Arar, who was subjected to months of torture
in his native Syria after being deported by the United States on
information provided by Canadian officials.
"In the end," said Paperny, "Bill Sampson became
a pawn, where he was released by the Americans releasing some terrorists
who were in Guantanamo Bay."
Sampson, as evidenced in the film, is enormously bitter towards
the Canadian government and what he perceives as its astonishing
lack of help in getting him out of Saudi Arabia.
Paperny pointed out that, "As one of the characters in the
film said, one of the lessons you learn from Bill Sampson's story
is that your government is not necessarily going to come to your
rescue.
"Canadians pride ourselves on being a progressive country,
a country based on certain moral, ethical principles ... we're people
that believe in human rights and the supremacy of those human rights
over more crass, political priorities. But Bill Sampson's story
indicates that we're not, as a country, we're not, as a people,
we're not, as our governments, that we elect, we're not living on
that moral high ground that we should be. And we should all be held
to account for that, because that shouldn't occur. Should we keep
open diplomatic relations with a country which is clearly torturing
one of our citizens, who's innocent of a crime that they've convicted
them of? These are questions which should be publicly debated and
I wanted this film to be part of that debate."
The voices of key Canadian diplomats, including former foreign affairs
minister Bill Graham, are heard in the film. But Paperny did not
go to Saudi Arabia to film. "They don't let many people in
there," he said, "and being a Jew, I wasn't keen to go
there. Hearing what they did to Bill Sampson, I wasn't keen to go
there, and I wasn't prepared to send my camera crew there without
me, either, because if the Saudis knew what we were doing, filming
there, they could have gotten into a lot of trouble."
Instead, he bought archival footage of Riyadh and hired a local
crew to film key sites, such as the house Sampson was living in
at the time of his arrest and certain government ministries. The
crew, said Paperny, was so clandestine that, "they didn't even
know what they were shooting for."
Re-enactments of Sampson's confinement and torture were filmed in
Vancouver, at Riverview and on a set that painstakingly recreated
Sampson's cell. Paperny was "determined to show audiences,
without freaking them out completely, some sense of what it was
like, first for Bill to be tortured, and, secondly, for a person
to be kept in solitary confinement for two-and-a-half years."
Although his company, Paperny Films, also produces more lighthearted
fare for television (Crash Test Mommy, New Classics with
Chef Rob Feenie), Paperny and his team – including his
wife, Audrey Mehler – have always made a point of having "a
few projects on the go which are going to challenge audiences with
controversial subject matter."
Among these have been a series on homelessness, another on gay marriage
and The Broadcast Tapes of Dr. Peter, which documented the
last two years in the life of AIDS patient Peter Jepson-Young and
garnered Paperny an Academy Award nomination.
Paperny said he owes much of his strong social conscience "to
my upbringing, to my parents, to their role in the Jewish community
in Calgary. I remember, to this day, being 10 years old, sitting
on the steps of the second floor of our house in Calgary as my dad
was rallying the Calgary Jewish community to support Israel at the
beginning of the Six Day War in 1967, and how proud I was of him
and how fascinated I was with him on how, here we were in this small
Western Canadian town and Dad was pouring his heart into raising
money for Israel, so far away."
Paperny's father was "a current affairs junkie," with
whom he used to watch The Journal (a show Paperny later joined
as a producer). His mother is an author. He was taught, he said,
that storytelling was "a good profession – a noble profession."
The Dr. Peter series was also the foundation for the building of
the Dr. Peter Centre in Vancouver, "which has become a model
internationally for community-based delivery of health care,"
said Paperny. "So the business that I'm in, the artistic world
I get to move through, can actually have a strong social impact.
And I think that comes back to the tikkun olam lessons that I learned
at the foot of my parents' bed and continue to this day, with the
Jewish community that I'm still involved with."
Confessions of an Innocent Man screens at VIFF Tuesday, Oct.
2, 7:15 p.m.; Friday, Oct. 5, 1:30 p.m.; and Friday, Oct. 12, 10:30
a.m. For tickets and information, visit www.viff.org.
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