Between 1989 and 2003, the nation of Liberia, on the western, sub-Saharan coast of Africa, collapsed into a civil war between the government of the despotic Charles Taylor and a coalition of warlords. Boys were conscripted, families torn apart, there were mass killings and rapes, and towns and villages were plundered and destroyed. In that sense, the Liberian conflict seems a mirror image of so many other African civil wars and atrocities that together have formed a kind of cruel cliché of Africa as a lost cause. But that’s where director Gini Reticker and producer Abigail Disney’s Pray the Devil Back to Hell shines like a beacon of hope. Their documentary casts light on how a group of commoners, driven only by the desire for peace, altered the course of a troubled nation’s history for the better. It’s even more astonishing to note that this group was made up entirely of women — mothers and daughters fed up with the cabal of thugs — all men — holding sway over their families and futures.
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Archive for November, 2008
Pray the Devil Back to Hell
November 10, 2008The World Unseen
November 3, 2008Race, gender, tradition, politics and sexuality get thrown together into a bright but bland masala mix in Shamim Sarif’s debut feature, The World Unseen. Sarif adapts from her own novel about the simmering attraction that develops between two Indian women in 1950s South Africa. One of these women is demure, compliant Miriam (Lisa Ray), mother of three and housewife to a dull prick of a man, Omar (Parvin Dabas), who runs a grocery business outside Capetown. Like most Indian immigrant settlers in South Africa at the time, Omar marches lockstep to the drum of a ruthlessly racist society, and while he keeps Miriam under his thumb, he carries on an affair with his sister-in-law Farah (Natalie Becker). Slowly yet surely, the emotionally neglected Miriam begins to fancy someone else, but her defiance of the norm is far more taboo-breaking than her husband’s, because the object of her adoration is the carefree Amina (Sheetal Sheth), the owner of a local café, and a woman.
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