Film Review--Pray the Devil Back to Hell

Pray the Devil Back to Hell
directed by Gini Reticker

War and famine. 1990's. It’s the same old bloody story that articulates an essential characteristic of the human animal. In Liberia, a country haunted by conflict, strife, and a wholesale disregard for the well being of its population, the women were getting fed up. Instead of sitting idly by and witnessing the continuous killing and maiming of their people with no respite, they organized. This film is their story and it is both terrifying and uplifting. The film suggests that grassroots resistence can make an impact on facts on the ground and that peoples need not mask their voices when faced with various agonies that immediately effect the course of their lives.

These are mothers, grandmothers, aunts, sisters, nieces, etc. and slowly but methodically they began to gather forces in a quest to impact the government of Liberia in finding a viable solution toward ending the bitter civil war between the embattled government of President Charles Taylor and insurgents such as Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD).

The film documents images that are deeply unsettling including children being recruited or kidnapped into bearing arms and fighting in the war. These young boys are given drugs to lower their inhibitions making them more malleable killing machines. We see them in groups being carted around in trucks, their special rifles gleaming, and a blank, expressionless look in their eyes.

As the civil war continued its unstable pace, women both Muslim and Christian unite in a singular force and begin their quiet protest. They gather and wait hoping to gain the President’s ear but are ultimately rebuffed. They weather extreme hot and hold their position perfectly unwilling to give up their fight for calm and peace. One of their leaders is a woman named Leymah Gbowee. She’s affable and driven in manner that is exceedingly rare and courageous. Eventually there are hundreds of women all wearing white t-shirts, itself an open protestation directed at the corrupt regime. They argue that women ought to deny their husbands sex until the conflict is settled.

Ultimately the women hold a sit-down protest at the Presidential palace in Ghana as negotiations are finally attempted between the two sides of the conflict. They refuse to move and are threatened with arrest but they remain firm. The film points out that the talks ultimately fail but that Charles Taylor is accused of crimes against humanity and other charges. He flees to Nigeria only to eventually resign as president in 2003. The question remains. Just how influential were these women in initiating a regime change that leads triumphantly to the rise to power of the first ever female African President, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf? The film would make it out that they were directly responsible for the removal of Taylor but these situations are often far more complex than a simple documentary film, however well constructed and ably told, can possibly reveal.

We are left with a very strong impression regarding the great potential for simple protests in impacting outrageous political circumstances. We come away with a belief that these demonstrations actually work in altering the landscape into something less rife with violence and fear-mongering. The film does a fine job setting up the conditions under which the majority of the population was forced to endure for a great many years that preceded Taylor’s reign.


This film celebrates a plea for peace in the region, and by extension, throughout the world. These women express outwardly an open, demonstrative desire to affect real and lasting change that clearly other means cannot remedy. Are they heroic or just opportunistic? Is it heroism to simply do what is the right thing to do when faced with circumstances that call for protest? Perhaps not, but there remains an impetus here that is focused entirely on facilitating the end of bloodshed, a termination of senseless violence that does not, cannot, recognize the will of those people who are caught in the crosshairs and give their lives to a struggle they can scarcely comprehend.