The Oath tells the story of two brothers-in-law whose experiences take us into the heart of al-Qaeda territory and on to Guantanamo Bay. Abu Jandal, once one of Osama Bin Laden’s closest bodyguards, now makes his living driving a taxi in Yemen. Meanwhile, the brother-in-law he recruited to al-Qaeda and who subsequently became Bin Laden’s personal driver, Salim Hamdan, sits in a cell in Guantanamo under seemingly tenuous charges of terrorism. The film is not only a rich psychological study of Abu Jandal, who expounds expansively on his views—religious and political—over the course of two years, but also a sensitive portrait in absentia of Hamdan, whom we never meet but whose letters reveal the emotional toll of Guantanamo. The second feature in filmmaker Laura Poitras’s trilogy about our post-9/11 world—following My Country, My Country, which screened at the 2007 festival—The Oath, though at times unsettling, is a vital window into a part of the world too few attempt to understand.  ST