Ralph Fiennes has Gitmo in his sights. After a weekend during which Guantanamo Bay’s infamous reputation as a human rights vacuum was dragged through the American courts by Associated Press (which demanded to know the identities of the camp’s detainees) and battered by the Archbishop of Canterbury, who decried it as an “extraordinary legal anomaly”, the Oscar-winning actor is pulling no punches.

“There is an argument for extreme measures, but I don’t see that the erosion of human rights has to be part of it,” he says. “It’s wrong for people who have tenuous connections or none at all to this whole issue to be imprisoned in Guantanamo without any access to legal representation. I don’t think it’s what we’re fighting for.”

Fiennes is unusually familiar with his subject matter. As the star of Robert Edwards’s political satire Land of the Blind, he spent a considerable part of the film clad in a Guantanamo orange jumpsuit, while his character’s wife and child were taken from him, his body beaten, his mind thoroughly rinsed, and his identity ultimately erased.

The film, which is as acerbic as Dr Strangelove, charts the Orwellian rise and fall of a neo-fascist regime in a strangely familiar political dystopia. Next week it will open this year’s Human Rights Watch International Film Festival. And, if it seems particularly bleak and unremittingly angry about the state of the international body politic, that’s because it’s real, says Fiennes.

“There’s not much hope for us all when you look at what’s going on, is there? In general, on the planet, in everything we do, we’re just conditioned to destroy each other. And if it sounds depressing, well, I wake up depressed every day at the thought of Iraq, Guantanamo and the laws being passed. It’s happening, it’s accelerating and it’s terrifying.”

It would seem that now, more than ever, the festival (now in its tenth year) is stingingly relevant viewing for anyone with more than a passing interest in the fate of mankind. Showcasing movies from all over the planet, in five London venues, the festival explores, with the finest film-making skills, everything from suicide bombing in Israel to mass murder in Peru to women’s rights in Iran to capital punishment in the UK to childhood poverty and resilience in Iraq.

Although wildly diverse in subject matter, the films are bound by an intensely sincere political conscientiousness (if the festival films do have a single thematic link it’s perhaps in the simple suggestion that human societies are all inherently corrupt, but essentially worth saving). And if the filmmaking climate surrounding the festival is hot again, then it’s partially thanks to the reflected Oscar glow of George Clooney and co and the so-called political awakening of Hollywood (see Syriana and Good Night, and Good Luck, as well as Fiennes’s own The Constant Gardener).

“We are like the nerd kid in school who’s suddenly cool,” says the festival programmer Andrea Holley. “But we have been doing the same thing for ten years now. I’m not putting down the mainstream political films at all, but there is a depth and a skill and even an ethical dimension to some of our films that literally leaves you feeling humbled.”

It’s true, of course, that a documentary film such as James Langley’s Iraq in Fragments moves beyond the codified parameters set by most media depictions of Iraq. Instead of gritty war reportage and roughly snapped vérité footage, it shows a wide-eyed 11-year-old garage hand searching for sense, security and a father figure in contemporary, decrepit, Baghdad.

Or it gives us young religious idealists drunk on power and uncertainty, bullying local alcohol traders. Or it simply luxuriates in breathtaking vistas that wouldn’t be out of place in a Terrence Malick film, or vignettes straight out of an Altman ensemble.

And yet, is there a danger that the festival itself, by its very nature as a middle-class media-literate endeavour, becomes a stagnant and slightly worthy exercise in breast-beating? “It goes way beyond preaching to the choir,” says Holley. “There’s always a ripple effect at this festival. The films make people go: ‘What if that was me?’ And getting people to ask that question is how you get people to act.”

Robert Edwards agrees. The former Army Intelligence officer and self-declared history nut has inserted into Land of the Blind a breathtaking array of political references, from Pol Pot’s Cambodia to Thatcher’s Northern Ireland and beyond, but has been equally judicious in pointing the finger of responsibility at cinema itself. The film’s dictator character, played by Tom Hollander, is also a hack director who makes B-grade action movies.

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