Some of the documentaries at Tribeca this year feel like messages in a bottle sent from the recent past, efforts at preserving material that will be useful to those who eventually write the definitive histories. Pray to Send the Devil Back to Hell is a mixture of old news footage and fresh interviews dealing with the fifteen years of chaos and carnage that followed the declaration of civil war in Liberia in 1989. Ragged as the movie is, it makes for an inspiring viewing experience, and its tribute to the "women's peace movement" of Liberia succeeds in taking something that, at the time, may have seemed like a footnote to the big events and making the case that it was instrumental in bringing about many of the happier developments in this story. The women's peace movement grew out of the escalating sense of hopelessness that developed as President Charles Taylor and the "warlords" jockeying to replace him both used violent terror as their main tool in their battle for power. Things finally got bas enough that the Christian and Muslim women of Liberia, for the first time in their history, joined forces to campaign for peace through public protests and more intimate strategies, such as what one of them calls "sex strikes." The campaigners betray no hesitation in declaring themselves the representatives of peace by virtue of their gender, and united as a group against men, who they regard as "guilty" of supporting violence "either by commission or omission." As they see it, the men are the ones with the power in their society, and if they didn't want the bloodshed to continue, they could do something to stop it. Instead, they've used their power to bring war--and to approve the use of rape as a weapon in warfare.
Eventually, the popular support their movement picked up forced Taylor and the warlords to the bargaining table and helped set in motion the chain of events that eventually landed Taylor in U.N. custody, where he's currently being tried for war crimes. In his absence, the warlords gathered to hammer out a peace agreement, though some began to feel that the proceedings were being needlessly prolonged because the participants enjoyed the hotel accommodations they were given after years of sleeping on the ground in a war zone. Finally, Leymah Gbowee, the co-ordinator of the women's peace movement, marched her troops into the hallways and kick-started the process by having a tearful, screaming fit. The movie has its share of horror stories about what went on during the war, but nothing else so dramatically conveys what it must have been like to live in Liberia during that time as the sight of Leymah Gbowee, who is radiant and serenely composed in the new interview footage, having an angry, sobbing meltdown--the last desperate resort of someone who's already done so much against such insurmountable odds that this last stupid roadblock has her ready to pop her cork and spew lava. Always slow to recognize an invaluable resource when it's fallen into their laps, the male security forces first asked the women to leave, then asked if some of them could help them tackle the delegates who had started trying to escape the premises by jumping out the windows. The film ends with a jubilant sense of accomplishment. "We campaigned until the end of the night," recalls one smiling woman. "We campaigned until we forgot that we could be raped!"
Another documentary, Fire Under the Snow, records the heroism of Palder Gyatso, a Tibetan monk who spent 33 years in Chinese custody, enduring starvation and torture until he managed to escape the country in 1992. This one, which draws its quiet power from its subject's on-screen demonstration of same, is moving and ends more or less happily but with an undertone of sad resignation: its hero now lives in India as a free man, but is a living symbol of someone who cannot return home. The title character of Milosovic on Trial, the former Serbian president and, one imagines, possible future roommate of Charles Taylor's, ultimately failed to live long enough to see a verdict delivered in the war crimes trial that he did so much to pointlessly prolong, his death of natural causes in his cell having denied the world to chance to see him bust a move at the end of a rope. Milosovic's trial was a footnote to the story of war and genocide in the Balkans at the end of the twentieth century, and Milosovic on Trial, an admirably solid, straightforward, public-television-style summing-up, doesn't pretend to be more than that. It benefits greatly from its footage of Milosovic in the dock, putting in his bid to be remembered as the ideal face of arrogant, rock-stupid-and-proud-of-it institutional villainy. With his thick, smirking face and shock of white hair, he looks like the malignant love child of Archie Bunker and Elmer Fudd, and this does not seem inappropriate to either his character or his place in history. One witness who describes a moment when Milosovic told him that he didn't believe in the existence of the piece of paper that the man was waving in his face at the time says that it was his impression that the top Serb felt that "if he said something, that made it true." Thank God such blind idiot faith in one's own self-serving horseshit is unknown in our own corridors of power. The other big revelation in the film is that all the lawyers who work on war crimes trials appear to have awful-looking teeth. Whatever draws people to this difficult, frustrating line of work, it can't be that the the U.N. has such a terrific dental plan.