A Brilliant Film About the Women Who Saved Liberia

The Daily Beast spoke with producer Abby Disney about Leymah and the bold women of WIPP, and how Pray the Devil Back to Hell is already inspiring women in other third-world countries. Pray the Devil opened in New York on Friday, and will open nationwide according to demand in the coming weeks—we suggest you demand it.

How did you discover the story of Leymah and WIPP?

Making a film was honestly the furthest thing from my mind at that point. I was in Liberia, on a delegation of American women excited about President Sirleaf’s election. We were there to see if there was anything we could do to support her presidency. The story was just in the air, but only in pieces. Women referred to sitting on that field for 2.5 years, and I could tell that something really dramatic had happened in Ghana at the peace talks. What occurred to me—I know this from my work and my life—is that when something dramatic happens with these types of women, often it isn’t recorded; it is erased. I was watching the historical process of erasure right there in Monrovia. And I thought, in this one case, it would be possible to pull it back from the edge.

How did you find Leymah?

Actually, when I got home, I still had only snippets. Ginny and I were old friends, so we got together on the project and started to do detective work, and there was NOTHING—on film, on tape, in print. Then, like a miracle, we found Leymah—my friends at Harvard called and said she had heard this woman speak at the UN. I didn’t understand who she was. But we went to a hotel she was staying in and sat down and talked to her and it was better than we thought. On top of leading this movement, she was charismatic and funny and the camera loved her. We realized we had this very compelling central figure. She really could be our film’s defining consciousness.

Was it hard to get the archival footage?

So difficult. For months we had nothing. We did find a British reporter who had embedded himself with the rebels. One of the interesting things was how easy the combat footage was to come by—you do a search for it, and the next thing you know is you are swimming in the most disturbing images of blood and gore. What was hard to find were the women working for peace, because no one knew they were there—we had reporters say to us, “We knew they were there, but why shoot them?” They were so pathetic. We were going to give up, and then we found this man—he was hired in 1979 to be the presidential videographer, and he was there for decades, through assassinations and coups and all of it. When he was downsized in 2006, he went home with all his masters. He gave us everything. The only reason there is footage of the womens’ meeting with President Charles Taylor is because we found that guy. And that’s a huge moment in the film.

You rely on five main women—and no narrator—to tell the story. Why did you choose that format?

It was so critical for me to not have an outside narrator. You don’t notice it, but in this film for 72 minutes, you never hear an American or a white person speak, and only hear women speak. It would be so undermining of these women’s authority to have a voice imposed from above on this story. They defined reality on their own and changed the course of things on their own. They can tell it.