In post-civil war Sierra Leone, amputees play soccer. Vans hurtle down Freetown's crowded city streets, festooned with painted words glorifying God. War don don -- war is over. Officially, anyway. But what does that mean for former bush wives, ex-child soldiers, and others, their identities hidden, who testify before the independent Special Court assembled to try members of the various rebel groups/criminal enterprises deemed responsible for eleven years of atrocities and human rights abuses?
With the documentary War Don Don, filmmaker/international human rights activist Rebecca Richman Cohen takes advantage of almost unprecedented access to the defense as well as the prosecution team to follow the trial of Issa Hassan Sesay, a Revolutionary United Front (RUF) leader. His alleged crimes are extensive and appalling, but can the Special Court provide a fair trial? What will its outcome prove? And what does it mean for the people of Sierra Leone?
Archival footage and talking heads, sewn together artfully with the scrolling snow and static of VHS tape, make it clear that Sesay is a guy who did [and ordered others to do] bad, bad things. But some of the testimony against him comes from cooperating witness who are among the worst criminals in west Africa. The witnesses are paid, and not all of the proceedings are captured on public video. Is Sesay meant to be a synecdoche for the RUF? And if so, to what end?
Over time, the film's strategy emerges. Sesay, a charismatic and complex figure who was himself a child soldier, is a hook, a way into the narrative Sierra Leone is fashioning for itself and for the world. Otherwise, justice becomes an abstraction next to practical nation-rebuilding concerns. Trials and palaces of justice in which to convene them, not to mention the technology and personnel involved in "bringing the courts to the people" in remote villages, all cost money that could otherwise go to repairing infrastructure and addressing dire conditions that are as much a product of endemic poverty as they are of the war. Paradoxically, demonstrating that Sierra Leone is committed to peace through justice could persuade far wealthier nations to loosen the purse strings and provide aid.
The mission of the Special Court of Sierra Leone is to try "those who bear greatest responsibility" for the crimes committed during the civil war. The way in which War Don Don gathers and edits together its own evidence, expert witnesses, and testimony calls the efficacy of the entire operation into question without offering us a pat verdict. See it.
***
A confession: I'll admit to skipping War Don Don at Full Frame. It had already picked up a special jury nod at SXSW and, indeed, scored more plaudits in Boston. Yeah, I knew I'd have a second chance at it, but I also harbored skeptical suspicions after seeing scores of docs -- about Sierra Leone's civil war specifically, the atrocities of war more generally on the African continent, and truth commissions there, in South America, in Asia, and in the United States -- about whether it'd send its PBS-supporting viewers out of the theatre clutching their reusable shopping bags full of CFL bulbs, off to grab sustainably harvested coffee with like-minded pals and discuss the film passionately and righteously before going on with life just as before. Maybe it did. However, the film's skepticism about its subject is much better researched and argued than mine was. Mea culpa.
