Essential Killing (Jerzy Skolimowski, 2010)

"I knew about the CIA planes landing in a nearby military airport from the press, and that prisoners from the Middle East were allegedly being brought into this secret base not very far away from my house. Instinctively, I refused to think of this as a subject of my next film because of its political context, as I don’t consider myself a political activist. Until one night in the winter, when I was driving back home on a forest road—very slippery—and I nearly fell into a kind of ravine. I stopped at the very last moment, and I realized that I was right next to the airport, and on the only road connecting the airport with the secret base. And I thought, “Damn, this is the road! If the prisoners were really here, they would’ve been traveling this exact way.” And since I nearly fell into the ravine, it could just as well happen to a vehicle in the convoy. And if that happened, there would be a great possibility that a prisoner could have escaped. At that moment, I thought, “This is it. This is the story I want to tell.” A man who has no idea which part of the world he’s been thrown into, who is facing the snow for the first time in his life, handcuffed and shackled, wearing a thin orange uniform fit for the desert, trying to escape into this wild, desolate landscape which he doesn’t know anything about. So everything that’s before that moment, the political context which is compressed to about 10 minutes in the film, I treat as a background for the story. It doesn’t matter if it’s this or that war, if it takes place in Afghanistan or Iraq or on the border of Pakistan. And it doesn’t even matter if this guy is a terrorist or a completely innocent man, because if you watch carefully [at] the beginning of the film, you will find a possibility that he is just a wrong man in a wrong place at the wrong time. What interests me is that this guy gets caught in these dramatic circumstances and is brought into this snowy landscape that is as far away from all he’s known as possible. By a strange turn of luck—or rather ultimate misfortune, as he will soon find out—he manages to escape. The film is about his struggle to survive."
- Jerzy Skolimowski on Essential Killing

This whole interview is actually quite amazing, I encourage all to read (it's not long for those with short attention span).

I just recently viewed Essential Killing and it is now at sitting somewhere up top in my Best of 2010 list; available on Instant Netflix.