My friend Matt writes in response to our post on the Congo titled Add Congo to the List:
Thanks for your recent Congo post, Dick. I had just watched a documentary called The Greatest Silence: Rape in the Congo. A student had bought the rights to show it for her high school culminating project and then let me borrow the DVD. It was unimaginable. Unimaginable. Hundreds of thousands of women and girls and small children gang-raped. Hundreds of thousands!! And their SVU (special victims unit) for the entire country consists of ONE woman with no budget.
The men gang-rape with impunity. And they don't just gang-rape, they then destroy the women's genitalia with rods and poles. It's demonic. Purely demonic. And the few people who can stand to work for justice there have the aura of Christ. I don't know how they do it. The film is also somewhat helpful in explaining the situation in the Congo and how hopeless it is. That's crushing. I'd like to turn to lighter news, but would feel flippant if I did.
Matt also recommends the documentary WarDance which he describes as "the most impressively and artistically crafted of all the films I've seen on Africa, and the most honestly crushing and uplifting film. The others rarely give you stories of hope amidst the horror. I have to believe that's partly because there is no hope, but as Christians we have to believe there is. Wardance leaves room for that."
He goes on to commend another documentary that we've talked about on Viewpoint in the past titled As We Forgive which is an amazing story of forgiveness and reconciliation in Rwanda in the wake of the savage genocide that occurred there in the '90s. Matt notes that it won the academy award for best documentary by a student filmmaker.
I hope that Viewpoint readers will take the time to watch at least one of these films. They're all eye-openers which will doubtless shatter our naive complacency about the world in which we live. I've added them to my Netflix queue.
RLC