In July 2008, like millions of Canadians, we watched 10 minutes of video footage of the interrogation of Omar Khadr.

This material that Omar’s Canadian lawyers had just released stunned us. We were shaken by the moment in which Omar realises that the Canadian intelligence agents who showed up at his cell in Guantanamo had not come to help and protect him as a Canadian citizen but rather to make clumsy attempts to cajole, manipulate and threaten him into making incriminating statements.

We felt compelled to use this footage as the basis for a short film.

Our mission would be to craft a documentary in which interviews would provide the context to help us understand what the recording of the interrogation was trying to tell us.

As is often the case in documentaries, the story evolved. Through contacts, we were able to obtain an additional seven hours of interrogation video, which the public had never seen. Some of the sound had been erased by the Canadian Security Intelligence Agency (CSIS), yet enough remained for us to realize that we had something special and rarely seen - the confrontation between an interrogator and a prisoner.

Indeed this is the only footage available that shows - partially - what takes place inside Guantanamo, the prison where, in the words of Dick Cheney, the former US vice president, the "cream of international terrorists" are supposedly locked up.

If you assume that documentaries reflect reality, you would also agree that reality includes segments that sit within the shadows of the invisible. Once in a while some of those segments leave their confinement to fall directly under the public spotlight. Making it public, as a documentary was, for us, a compelling though somewhat bizarre privilege.

Omar’s story was turned down almost everywhere. Disappointed but not defeated, we approached Canal D, a French-language private Canadian broadcaster. The channel gave us a small licence. It was not enough to cover production costs, but we invested our time and some of our own money.

As filmmakers we wanted to encourage a deeper dialogue over current Canadian security policy.

Since the US launched its global 'war on terror' following 9/11, there has been a corresponding shift in Canadian military and security policy. Omar’s video and other recently released documents mean that the Canadian government can no longer claim to be unstained by torture. In fact, Canada has sent several teams of interrogators to Guantanamo.

Before the Canadian interrogators visited Omar, Ottawa knew that he had been tortured. The military lawyer defending Omar established that in 2002, before his transfer to Guantanamo, Omar was detained at Afghanistan’s Bagram Air Base. His chief interrogator there was Joshua Claus., who had pleaded guilty to torturing to death a young Afghani taxi driver named Dilawar.

Knowing all that, the Canadian government continued to claim that the American authorities treated Omar humanely and that he had committed a very serious crime.

International conventions that protect the rights of children in wartime, and in particular the rights of child soldiers, should have applied to Omar. But Ottawa was able to sidestep those laws.

In October 2010, Omar pleaded guilty to all the charges pressed by the US. It was clearly a plea bargain that allowed the young Canadian to serve eight years in jail, rather than 40. He became the first person ever convicted as a war criminal for acts committed as a juvenile.