TOP OF THE WORLD: Looking down on Egypt from The Yacoubian Building.

The past commemorated by the festival's opening night film, United 93, hardly runs the risk of being forgotten, but several of Tribeca's films brought back memories of even more recent events which have still managed to fade from the collective memory. Directed by busy bee Michael Winterbottom, The Road to Guantanamo blends documentary interviews and dramatic reenactments to tell the story of three British citizens who spent more than two years in the U.S. prison camp after being captured in Afghanistan. The movie's approach is mainly to illustrate its now-vindicated subjects' story, which leaves some critical points—such as why they hopped the Pakistani-Afghan border after Sept. 11—unilluminated. But the depiction of lawless imprisonment where Muslim captives are forbidden to pray cuts through the limitations of docudrama, underlining the perpetuation of a still-extant injustice.

The Iraq war's American casualties are the subject of Richard Hankin's Home Front and Deborah Scranton's The War Tapes. War Tapes follows three members of a New Hampshire National Guard infantry during their yearlong tour, using footage shot by the soldiers to convey the anxiety (and, at times, the exhilaration) of boots-on-the-ground combat. More than its firefights, Home Front is noteworthy as a record of the day-to-day strain of living in a war zone: Scranton's subjects compare the money they're paid to risk their lives with the high salaries of KBR truck drivers (one dubs the conflict "the war for cheese"), while a Lebanon-born Guardsman weathers the racist terms tossed off by battle-weary GIs even as he longs to fire off a few rounds. No such disillusionment infects Blairsville, Pa.'s Jeremy Feldbusch, who returns from Iraq blind and brain-damaged by a piece of shrapnel. Welcomed home at a rally where he is proclaimed a veteran of "the war on terror which was a direct result of 9/11," Feldbusch maintains an upbeat, even jokey, exterior, but his injuries can't be overcome by punch-in-the-arm stoicism (to say nothing of hunting trips with his father). Eventually, he finds a measure of comradeship in the Wounded Warrior Project, but agitating on behalf of wounded veterans proves more disheartening than war itself; petitioning Congress, Feldbusch says, is "like running into a brick wall."

Both War Tapes and Home Front demonstrate the extreme remove at which U.S. soldiers are kept from the people they're supposed to be protecting: When a stranger asks Feldbusch, "How were the people over there?" he can only answer, "I don't know." Andrew Berends' The Blood of My Brother: A Story of Death in Iraq attempts to connect the sides by cutting from U.S. soldiers on patrol to the younger brother of an Iraqi portrait photographer who was shot dead by U.S. troops while volunteering as a guard at the Kadhimiya mosque. The boy's rage grows almost despite himself; although he says he knows not all Americans are to blame, he admits, "Every time I see an American or a Jew I want to kill him." Although the footage of rallies held by radical cleric Muqtada al-Sadr is revelatory, Berends' cross-cutting fails to bridge the gap between poles: We see embattled Americans and enraged Iraqis without getting a sense of what might ever connect them.

Connections abound in The Yacoubian Building, a sprawling Egyptian melodrama that emerged as one of Tribeca's hot tickets. Just under three hours, with a large cast of top Arab stars, Marwan Hamed's hot-blooded epic is something like an Egyptian Best of Youth, an omnivorous drama which makes up in scope what it lacks in subtlety. The titular structure is a real-life apartment building that once served as a symbol of Cairo's European ambitions. Now its apartments are home to the likes of Zaki Pasha (Adel Imam), a faded, vaguely pathetic aristocrat clinging to his fractured French as his scheming sister plots to rob him of his little remaining dignity. Adapting Alaa Al Aswany's best-selling novel, Hamed casts a wide net—too wide at times, since the movie's many plots rarely intersect, and characters that might have flourished with more attention are reduced to caricatures—particularly that of a closeted newspaper editor (Khaled El Sawy) whose awkward handling reduces his tragic end to borderline comedy. Still, considering that so many American features are stuck in a navel-gazing rut, Yacoubian's overreaching is positively invigorating.