“5 Years of Life” is the film adaptation of Murat Kurnaz’s autobiography “Five Years of My Life” from 2013. The film by director Stefan Schaller tells the story of Kurnaz, who was held innocently in the Guantanamo prison camp and accused of being an Islamist terrorist. It was Schaller’s first feature film and also his diploma thesis at the Baden-Württemberg Film Academy. The director, who was born in the same year as Murat Kurnaz, was affected by the reports about Kurnaz’s fate, which motivated him to make the book into a film. 5 Years of Life” was filmed in Brandenburg and at Studio Babelsberg.

German-Turkish Murat Kurnaz (Sascha Alexander Geršak) earns his money in a Turkish discotheque. But the drug dealing that goes on there gets to him and when his friend Elyas is shot dead, Murat decides to change his life. He begins to study the Islamic faith and visits the mosque more and more often. Together with his friend Serdal, he wants to visit a Koran school in Pakistan, but Serdal is stopped at the airport and so Murat travels to Pakistan alone. There he is arrested at a security checkpoint and handed over to the US forces in Afghanistan, who eventually take him to the Guantanamo Bay prison camp. There he is asked to confess that he wanted to fight with the Taliban in Afghanistan. But Murat refuses to lie – he is innocent. The interrogation specialist Gail Holford (Ben Miles) does everything he can to get him to confess. Murat has to endure interrogation, torture and solitary confinement and breaks down several times. In the course of the recurring interrogations, he realizes that there are people out there who believe in his innocence and that this is the real reason why Holford has to get a confession from him with all his might. Through this realization, Murat remains strong and demonstrates a resilience against which even Holford is powerless. After five years in prison, the martyrdom comes to an end – Murat Kurnaz is released.