The runner-up in this year's SXSW Documentary Competition was Rebecca Richman Cohen's WAR DON DON. Like fellow comp doc CANAL STREET MADAM, WAR DON DON was a grantee in Full Frame's Garrett Scott Documentary Development Program.
The film chronicles the war crimes trial of Issa Sesay in Sierra Leone - a man who may have committed crimes against humanity and who may have brought peace to the civil war-ravaged country.
Pamela Cohn, writing at Still in Motion, praises the film as "a superb piece of work on every level":
"The film supplies incredible visual power, is rhythmically precise in its pace and timbre, and presents the hard-won access these filmmakers had to its very best advantage for the viewer to weigh, ponder, listen and learn. Never outright didactic, and, thankfully not narrated by the filmmaker or anyone else, it has a lot of nuanced and, downright contradictory, information to impart. WAR DON DON ("the war is over" in Krio) is one of the most intelligent, balanced, thoughtful films I've seen in a while."
Michael May of the Texas Observer says it's "one of the most thought-provoking documentaries you will see this year":
"The film takes you inside the expensive and time-consuming process of international justice. In this case, the international war crimes tribunal sets up a special court in Freetown, and spends more than $200 million on the trials of ten men, who are considered to be the most culpable for the atrocities. The first half of the movie builds the case for justice, by letting you absorb the bone-chilling accounts of the war by the victim’s themselves and taking you along as Chief Prosecutor David Crane travels the country building public relations for the tribunal. It’s amazing to see hundreds of villagers crowded around small television sets watching the trial, completely engaged and hungry for justice.
But after the filmmakers have you ready to see heads roll, they slowly unpeel the court’s process, leaving you ultimately unsure of Sesay’s guilt, and whether an individual could ever get a fair trial in an international court. In Sesay’s trial, many of the key witnesses are themselves war criminals, but thanks to their cooperation are being paid handsome salaries to testify. This creates a huge incentive for the witnesses to lie in order to implicate the defendants, but any attempt by the defense to point this out is brushed aside by the judges."
The Dallas Morning News' Chris Vognar calls the film "evenhanded but subtly critical look at a commander on trial for war crimes"
"WAR DON DON is a legal-process film that incorporates small dramas of reconciliation, revenge and a justice system which, like most, has inherent flaws. Richman's film doesn't stand up and shout, "Rush to judgment!" Instead it quietly observes that all mass atrocities, in this case a long and bloody civil war, require symbols of retribution."
At the Fort-Worth Star Telegram, Christopher Kelly had a mixed reaction, although he still calls the film "worthwhile":
"The first half of the picture, which explains the decade-long civil war in Sierra Leone and its tenuous resolution in 2002, is gripping and lucid; the second half -- in which Cohen does backflips to try to argue that Sesay was railroaded by the international criminal court -- devolves into a liberal naivite. (The movie basically argues that, even though he oversaw the murder, decapitation and rape of thousands of people, he somehow took the fall for RUF members who committed even greater atrocities.) Still, this is a notable effort that kept the audience rapt at its premiere on Saturday afternoon."
Cohen blogs about SXSW for IFP.
At indieWIRE, Cohen offers some background of how she came to make the film:
"While I was in law school, I worked on a defense team at the Special Court for Sierra Leone – and I came to know lawyers on the prosecution and the defense of Issa Sesay’s trial. Both sides had some of the brightest and most impassioned lawyers I’ve ever met and I was fascinated by the moral, political, and legal questions that their passionate commitments evoked. Combining my legal experience in criminal defense with my background as a filmmaker, I realized that a documentary film could capture the complexities of the issues in way that neither law review articles nor mainstream media could or would represent."
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