Three men from Tipton who were held at Guantanamo Bay as suspected terrorists were hailed as heroes yesterday when a film documenting their suffering was premiered at the Berlin Film Festival

The film about Shafiq Rasul, Ruhel Ahmed and Asif Iqbal, who at the time were nicknamed the Tipton Taliban, was greeted with enthusiasm and applause as the trio called for the detention centre to be closed down.

Made by acclaimed director Michael Winterbottom, Road to Guantanamo combines documentary footage with dramatic reconstructions of the ordeal of the three men who claimed they were brutally beaten and tortured by American soldiers.

Speaking at the premiere yesterday, Shafiq Rasul said he wanted "to show the world what was happening".

He said they were still haunted by the memories of their ordeal.

"It was hard to sleep. You would hear the sound of the soldiers banging on the cells in the back of your head. You would wake up sweating, thinking it was the soldiers, and then you would realise you were back home."

Mr Rasul and Mr Ahmed said they were both disappointed by the lack of support shown by some members of the Muslim community when they returned to the West Midlands.

Mr Rasul said: "They didn't want anything to do with us because in their eyes, not all of them but in the area where we live, we were guilty. It was hard for our families not knowing who to turn to. It was our lawyers and people like Amnesty International who gave support to our families and helped them get through."

The film depicts the trio being treated brutally by American soldiers, including scenes where they were chained, gagged and blindfolded with blacked-out goggles, interrogated at gunpoint, kept in cages where they were not allowed to stand or even talk and made to kneel for hours on end in the baking Cuban sun.

It also shows them chained to the floor in isolation cells for so long they were forced to defecate and urinate on themselves while their ears were blasted with loud rock music.

Mr Winterbottom said he made the film to "remind people how bizarre it was that Guantanamo actually exists".

He added: "If someone said to you five years ago that the Americans were going to create a prison - in Cuba of all places because holding these people would be illegal in their own country - that they would be fighting a war yet these people are not prisoners of war and that they were holding people for four years without any trial, you would have thought they were crazy."

The Tipton three ended up in Guantanamo after visiting Pakistan for Asif Iqbal's wed-ding in September 2001.

They travelled to Afghanistan after an imam appealed for men to go and offer aid to the people there. When Afghanistan was bombed they tried to get back to Pakistan but instead were captured by the Northern Alliance and accused of being Taliban.

They said they were tortured and accused of countless terrorist offences. They spent two years in Guantanamo before being flown back to Britain where they were interviewed by the Anti-Terrorist Squad before being released without charge. n Road to Guantanamo will be screened on Channel 4 on March 9.