The Prisoner Or: How I Planned to Kill Tony Blair (right) is sure to make as many waves at TIFF this year as the directors? previous film Gunner Palace did when it debuted here in 2004. In one memorable moment in Gunner Palace, director Michael Tucker filmed US forces making a house raid. One Iraqi prisoner looks up at the camera and says, ?I?m a journalist too? before he gets led away. That moment haunted Tucker. He always wondered who the man was and what happened to him. Two years later he found out. In The Prisoner, Tucker and directing partner Petra Epperlein tell the remarkable story of the innocent prisoner as he went through a nine-month ordeal in Abu Ghraib and other detention facilities. The film combines a comic book motif with the prisoner?s home movies and other eclectic footage. It plays like an Errol Morris movie crossed with a Joe Sacco comic book.

Below, Tucker remembers his experience at TIFF two years ago?.

MICHAEL TUCKER:
When Gunner Palace premiered at TIFF in 2004, we invited one of the soldiers featured in the film, Captain Jon Powers, to speak to the audience. Jon, who had left Iraq just a month before - after 14 months in Baghdad in Najaf - drove up from Buffalo with his family and brought along another soldier, Captain Chris Lovell, who was stationed at Ft. Drum. After the screening, Jon and Chris took the stage to field questions. For the first time I saw the disconnect between the reality of their experience and our perception of that reality at home. For the audience, the war was political, but for Jon and Chris, fresh from Iraq, it was personal. Talking about his experience was therapeutic for Jon and for the next 9 months he traveled around the country with me screening the film and meeting with journalists. Born out of that tour, he returned to Baghdad and formed the non-profit War Kids Relief to provide assistance and programs for Iraqi orphans and youth.  Today, I can't help but think that the warm reception he received in Toronto gave him the confidence to find a way to channel his frustration into a positive force.