by Ryan Macdonald

Keeping with the comedic air, I headed out to the Egyptian Theatre to see a documentary called, “The Redemption of General Butt Naked”. Turns out it wasn’t the study in ridiculousness I thought it’d be.

Daniele Anastasion’ and Eric Strauss’s latest documentary is about Joshua Milton Blahyi, an evangelical preacher in Liberia who preaches forgiveness and compassion. The kicker is, Joshua is a war criminal responsible for thousands of deaths during the Liberian civil war, and he used to go by the name, “General Butt Naked”.

The name is misleadingly humorous. Joshua actually believed that, when naked, he could unlock his “power” faster, and that he couldn’t be harmed by machetes or bullets. He would walk down the street with his Butt Naked Brigade (that’s not a joke) clothed only in weaponry, slaughtering combatants and bystanders alike. Now, Joshua has returned to preach the good word and ask forgiveness of the many, many people he hurt.

This documentary is respectable in that it presents a fairly unbiased look into the subject matter. Joshua killed people. He ordered people killed. He shot his own soldier in both kneecaps and locked him in a room for days, ultimately costing the young man his legs. His soldiers bashed infants against rocks because General Butt Naked said, “the son of my enemy will grow up to be my enemy”. Yet seeing Joshua on the streets of Liberia with a bible in his hand, he is articulate, remorseful, and most interesting, confident in his belief that God has forgiven him.

As we delve deeper, our initial hatred for this man is blurred. He goes into the ghetto where his ex-soldiers are living, most of them drug addicts. He cleans them up, gets them off drugs, gives them food. He takes them to Bible studies which he leads. On the surface, he’s changed. He is a completely different person.

Then things get strange. Watching Joshua on the pulpit, shouting to god, almost demanding his congregation to call on the name of Jesus, evokes the image of a General shouting orders to his troops. What could legitimately be a man consumed by the Holy Spirit also appears to be a man who is far too comfortable in a position of power.

It gets even more uncomfortable when Joshua talks with a woman whose brother he shot and killed. When he visits the home of the soldier he crippled. When he confronts a woman whose husband he killed, whose daughter he blinded in one eye. When he comes face to face with a young man who lost his entire family to Butt Naked’s bloodlust, and now has no one. You have to give him credit for being able to face his mistakes, actually look them in the eye. But is that enough?

This documentary isn’t easy to watch. Not the same way How to Die in Oregon was hard. This is hard because you don’t want to forgive Joshua. Yes, you want to believe that forgiveness is possible, that people can change. You’d like to believe that spirituality of any kind could be a transformative force. But the things this guy did…how can we? I credit the filmmakers for never actually answering that question. They do pose it, and they do make us answer it ourselves, but not once do they give us a solid “Yes” or “No”.

I really, really liked this documentary. I would definitely recommend it. However, as far as documentary filmmaking goes, I was extremely distracted by the camera work. The camera man seemed more concerned with stylizing his shots than capturing reality. There couldn’t be a single scene without a pan, a zoom, a sweep, moving to a different angle. In a film that largely succeeded in documenting without influencing, this was something that I really couldn’t ignore. Did it ruin the film for me? No. Was it an ill-conceived way of showing us reality? Absolutely. Would I still tell people to check it out? Without a doubt. But next time, I might recommend a tripod.

Final Grade: B

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