A new documentary exposes the unseen corners of American interrogation techniques.

Alex Gibney’s documentary Taxi to the Dark Side examines the controversial treatment of detainees at the Bagram, Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay prisons.

The film recounts the story of Dilawar, an innocent taxi driver who was apprehended, detained at the Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan and tortured by U.S. military personnel. He died five days later. The coroner who performed the autopsy deemed the cause of death “homicide,” and described Dilawar’s legs as “pulpified.”

Watch an interview with Alex Gibney, the documentary’s director, about the darkest hours of the film.Watch the official trailer for Taxi to the Dark Side, and some clips from the film.Building upon the work of New York Times reporters Tim Golden and Carlotta Gall (who wrote the first stories about the homicides at Bagram), Gibney’s film contains exclusive interviews and offers a bi-partisan narrative. It places the views of former government officials side-by-side with interrogators, prison guards and the families of tortured prisoners. The intimate accounts from an insider perspective slowly reveal the injustices that took place.

“Some of the guards and the interrogators who spoke with us had been scapegoated to some extent,” Gibney said in an interview. “They had an axe to grind. I think there are a number of people in the administration who felt that something deeply wrong had happened, and they really needed to get that off their chest.”

Shocking images from inside the prisons contrast the pain and humiliation of stripped and chained detainees with the grinning guards who held them down while flashing the camera a thumbs-up. The documentary contains many never-before-seen photographs—some more dramatic than those that have been released and printed so far about Abu Ghraib.

Though it is painful to watch, Taxi to the Dark Side is an important film.

“I hope the viewers will get mad as hell,” Gibney said. “I hope they’ll really get angry and say they’re not going to take it any more.”

Emmy and Grammy award-winning filmmaker Alex Gibney is the director of Taxi to the Dark Side. In 2005, he was nominated for an Oscar for his work on the documentary Enron: The Smartest Men in the Room. Gibney attended Yale University and completed film school at UCLA. The founder and president of Jigsaw Productions, he produces, writes and directs independent films, music documentaries and TV mini-series.