I really wish that there existed a decent documentary about the horrible civil war in Sierra Leone. This one, though, is disturbing on many levels. First, the film-makers criticize the international media for focusing on amputees. Yet over and over again the film traffics in this same type of pornography of violence, for no apparent reason that serves the narrative other than to shock the viewer and promote the underlying impression (which they surely didn't intend) of "African savagery." Second, while I'm no expert on Sierra Leone, the film's handling of the conflict seems far from even-handed. I'm willing to agree that attrocities by the RUF were given far more attention than attrocities by ECOMOG. But this film comes very, very, close to saying that the RUF was unfairly scapegoated. This slides dangerously close to an appology for the horrible acts that the RUF committed. The overall message here is plain and important: it was the civilians in Sierra Leone who suffered while the international community ignored the conflict or manipulated it for its own gain, and that this is part of a larger colonial and neo-colonial pattern of denying Africans autonomous control over their own societies. But surely this point could have been made more intelligently and with more nuanced analysis.
