The Redemption of General Butt Naked (Daniele Anastasion & Eric Strauss | Liberia | 90 min.)
Guilt or innocence are relatively easy to proclaim. Remorse, forgiveness, redemption: these concepts are more difficult to determine. In a shocking testimony before the Liberian Truth and Reconciliation Committee, Blahyi confesses to having led his conscripted army (including many cutlass-wielding children) to commit an improbable 20,000 murders. He is the first warlord to appear before the Committee and has come before them voluntarily. His current persona straddles braggadocio and remorse: he seems proud of his penitence. It's an unsettling stance.

He now makes a living preaching about his salvation. There is a miraculous parable that ripples throughout the film: against Blahyi's will, a priest appeared in his room; for allowing the man in, Blahyi crippled his bodyguard—but the seed of his epiphany was planted. Today, his sermons are terrifically dynamic, and filmed here with a swirling intensity that immerses the viewer in the sweat-filled, single-room chapels. But many former victims doubt the sincerity or veracity of his conversion: "Joining a particular religion does not replace justice." Yet in a nation where a man who was caught on camera torturing the former president is now a senator who denies any past wrong-doing, there is a legitimate need for public contrition.

We witness the stunning drama of Blahyi's personal apologies to his victims. To a man who's family he slaughtered, Blahyi offers to play the brother. With a woman whose husband he murdered and daughter he blinded, Blahyi makes an uncomfortable example of their forgiveness in public at a church. Blahyi has begun a shelter, with food, beds and bibles, for victims and former soldiers, now outcast, but still troublingly reliant solely on him. And with the former conscripted child soldier whom Blahyi's crippled—one can only imagine the nightmare visions that occur to these people when Blahyi reappears in their lives—Blahyi once again becomes a figure to revere.

We may question Blahyi's contrition, and doubt the depth of his victim's forgiveness, but when he looks into the eye of someone he hurt, when they weep in his arms, we know that hope may be intangible, it may not improve these shattered lives, but for each, there appears no other recourse; why not try forgiveness? In the end we may not feel that Blahyi has found genuine redemption, but this powerful and complex film forces us to question the very nature of the concept.

generalbuttnakedmovie.com

- Mark Elijah Rosenberg

Janka Nabay
“There was also an African apparition: Janka Nabay from Sierra Leone, wearing a straw skirt and singing and dancing to recorded tracks of what he said was a 500-year-old tradition called bubu music. The tracks were modern, and the beat, fast and skeletal and driven by bell taps, was unstoppable, demanding wider dissemination.” -NY Times