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Academy Vet's Day showing of Pray the Devil Back to Hell highlights women's world peace building
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The screening of Pray the Devil Back to Hell on 11 November as a part of the 28th annual Contemporary Documentaries series of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and the official 10 November release of the DVD of the film are set to coincide with the 2009 U.S. Veteran’s Day and offer a reflection on women, war and peace.
Pray the Devil Back to Hell will be presented in a program with Blessed is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh, a documentary of Senesh’s paratrooper mission in World War II Hungary to rescue Jews. Both documentaries highlight the role of brave women during wartime. The Academy describes the annual series as “a showcase for feature-length and short documentaries drawn from the 2008 Academy Award® nominations, including the winners, as well as other important and innovative films considered by the Academy that year.” As the series is a part of the Academy educational outreach, admission is free. (For details on time and location for readers in the LA area, visit www.oscars.org.)
Women as Instruments of Peace from Athens to Liberia
Not since Aristophanes’ final play in 411 BCE for his “War and Peace” trilogy, Lysistrata, has anyone captured quite so poignantly the power of women to take a stand for peace. Where Lysistrata and her sister Athenians seize the Acropolis with its state treasury and then refused sexual favors until the men of Athens agreed to stop their endless warring, in Pray the Devil Back to Hell, the women of Liberia chose other forms of nonviolent protest to effect a sea change in the bloody civil war that was ripping their homeland apart.
Pray the Devil Back to Hell premiered at the 2008 Tribeca Film Festival where it took the award for Best Documentary Feature. It has also received awards at a variety of festivals, including the One World International Human Rights Film Festival in Prague and the Movies that Matter Film Festival in the Netherlands. It recently received the Gabriel Award from the Catholic Academy for Communication Arts Professionals. Leymah Gbowee, a key leader of the Liberian Mass Action for Peace women’s coalition, has received the Blue Ribbon for Peace from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, the May 2009 John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage award, and the 2009 Gruber Women’s Rights Prize, awards she accepted on behalf of her countrywomen. The Alliance of Women Film Journalists presented its 2008 Award for Humanitarian Activism to all of the women in Pray the Devil Back to Hell.
Pray the Devil Back to Hell indie documentary captures Liberian women’s stand for peace
Directed and produced by Abigail Disney and Gini Reticker, the film weaves together interviews, archival images, and footage of present day Liberia in an account of the women of who took on the warlords and the Charles Taylor regime to finally bring peace to their country in 2003. Under the leadership of Leymah Gbowee, Etwenda “Sugars” Cooper, Vaiba Flomo, and Asatu Bah Kenneth, a united group of the women of Monrovia—Muslim and Christian alike—stood, dressed in white to symbolize peace, as a literal line between opposing forces and even barricaded the site of the stalled peace talks in Ghana. Threatening to remove their clothes if the men attempted to expel them from the talks, they won the day—and the war, leading to the exile of Charles Taylor and the election of Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, Africa’s first female head of state.
Disney’s work with the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government brought her together with President Sirleaf in 2006. In 2007, she joined with director/producer Gini Reticker, an Emmy-award winner for her documentary for PBS’s Wide Angle on women as change agents in the rebuilding of Rwanda, Ladies First (2004). Together, they partnered with Leymah Gbowee, a leader of the Liberian women’s peace movement, to document on film the story of the “women in white.” Set against twenty years of violence, known for its dependence on child soldiers, it acknowledges the “powerful voice of women” and shows how a small grassroots group of women became, as the film notes, “the conscience of their country, the moral compass in a place that had lost its way.”
DVD of Pray the Devil Back to Hell to be released 10 November
The DVD is available as of 10 November through the Pray the Devil Back to Hell website, Amazon.com, Netflix, and selected retailers for a retail price of $24.95. It contains the 85 minute film, the theatrical trailer, Leymah Gbowee’s acceptance speech for the John F. Kennedy Profile in Courage Award, and Lynn Sherr’s interview with Leymah Gbowee and Abigail E. Disney for PBS’s Bill Moyers Journal. For purchases through the PDBH website, a donation of $5 is added to Peace is Loud, a foundation inspired by the women of Liberia and dedicated to supporting those engaged in non-violent peace actions.
Find Screenings of Pray the Devil Back to Hell in local communities throughout the world
During November and December, the film is showing in the United States from Hollywood CA to Austin TX to Asheville NC and internationally from Romania to Australia and Quebec to Cape Verde Islands. Find a nearby screening on Pray the Devil Back to Hell’s website. Information and pricing for arranging a screening in your community, complete with discussion material from Teachers College of Columbia University, using an educational/public license can be found through the distributor, Ro*co Films Educational.
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