November 7, 2008

Coming soon:Pray the Devil Back to Hell

The documentary chronicles the women’s movement in Liberia that helped put an end to more than a decade of civil war, rape and terror.  Never underestimate the power of the collective.

Bob Mondello reported on the upcoming documentary and interviewed Gini Reticker and Leymah Gbowee:

In telling their story, Gini Reticker’s passionate documentary Pray the Devil Back to Hell uses testimony from women who joined forces, with parallel efforts in the Christian and Muslim communities, to fight back with moral rectitude as their sisters and daughters were being raped, their husbands murdered, their babies maimed.

Leymah Gbowee recalls turning a dream she had — of gathering women to pray for peace — into public activism. Other women recount horrific tales of the ways in which gun-toting 10-year-old boys brutalized whole towns.

And Reticker’s camera follows along as the women slowly, patiently create a national movement that engages in increasingly dangerous confrontations with a ruthless dictator — and ultimately, at peace talks, with brutal revolutionary warlords who are at least as dangerous as the man they’re all fighting.

Yes, we can.