In the Old Testament, upon learning the news of Haman's plot to destroy the Jewish people, Mordecai sheds his clothing for sackcloth and ashes and leads his people to protest at the King's palace. However, it is Esther, herself a Jew within the Kingdom of Ahasuerus, who summons the strength to confront Haman's order, thereby saving the fate of her people.
Such is the extraordinary story of a small band of Liberian women in Gini Reticker's new documentary, Pray the Devil Back to Hell. They formed a powerful resistance to a corrupt regime, demanding peace between opposing sides of a ravaging civil war armed with little more than white t-shirts, their womanhood, and vigorous convictions.
While founded by former slaves from the United States, under the premise of freedom, Liberia's history has been marked by chaos and unrest. In 1996, newly elected president Charles Taylor dissolved any hopes of regaining peace. Assuming a powerful mandate from his devout Christian faith, Taylor installed a corrupt dictatorship. As opposing warlords, mostly Muslim, took up arms against his regime, the country receded into civil war marked by rape, murder, and the forced conscription of child soldiers, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of Liberians killed and another million displaced.
"Does a bullet know Christian from Muslim?" one woman asks the camera. The women of Liberia, led by Leywah Gbowee and a small group of church women in the summer of 2003, reached across religious lines, bridging Muslim and Christian differences to form a coalition founded on the principle of peaceful resolution.
In Monrovia, Liberia's capital city, the women gathered and waged sit-ins in the central fish market, insisting that Taylor meet with them and forcing both sides to participate in cease-fire negotiations. Employing the strength of Lysistrata, and Aristophanes' heroines of the Peloponnesian War, they withheld sex from their men and in a powerful scene, barricaded the conference building in Ghana where peace talks had stalled, demanding progress.
Like other documentaries to emerge from the festival circuit to secure theatrical release this year, Pray the Devil Back to Hell (winner of the Best Documentary Award at The Tribeca Film Festival this spring) is a story of moral courage and strength of character that succeeds without overselling its agenda. At the center of the film, the Liberian women provide on-screen testimony, around which, utilizing archival footage, selective press coverage, and original film of modern-day Liberia, Reticker recreates a story from the ground up with the individuals that became a movement towards non-violent resolution largely ignored by the international press.
Although the events that Reticker captures on screen from the summer of 2003 are severed from a complex and conflict-ridden past, one does not need an outline of the decades of war -- not beyond the unsettling footage of mass burials and the bloodshot eyes of frantic child soldiers -- to understand the scale of injustice these women overcame to realign the future of their shattered country.
Reticker presents viewers with a core group of women who organized the peace rallies and strategized their demands of Taylor and the rebel groups, refraining from any canonization of the individuals for their sacrifices. She spares us narration but relies on the compelling power of the women's own anecdotes -- as refreshingly understated and focused as their own attitude towards their triumph -- and lets her subjects tell the story from their first hand account.
If anything, Reticker threatens to leave us wanting more of these individuals. The film offers a stand-in cast of characters who aided the strategic orchestration of a revolution: Leywah Gbowee, the social worker who came to mobilize the women of her church; Asatu Bah Kenneth, a police officer who helped distill information about the war; and Janet Johnson Bryant, a journalist who leveraged the power of media by broadcasting the women's demands for peace on Radio Veritas in Monrovia, but their profiles remain obscure. Their story is part of a larger narrative of mothers and daughters, widows and church women who restored stability in Liberia. Herein lies the lesson of successful non-violent movements worldwide: grass-roots action collectively represented can leverage the power to dismantle injustice.
"It's just as Esther did for her people who dressed in white and ashes," one woman explains, fashioning her head cloth. These women engineered an unlikely alliance that saw through to the trial and exile of Charles Taylor and the election of Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, first female elected to head of state in Africa. Far from stories found in Greek comedy or Biblical text, Pray The Devil Back to Hell offers a contemporary inquiry into the spectrum of human nature, from throes of insurgent malevolence to the most resolute sensibilities for justice, showing what these women overcame and how their own faith transcended scripture to unite in peace.
Pray The Devil Back to Hell opened in New York on Nov. 7, and in Los Angeles on Nov. 14, with a national release to follow.