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Words from PDBH Director and Producer
Gini Reticker and Abigail Disney
As we draw to a close on what has been a remarkable year with Pray the Devil Back to Hell, we want to ask you to join us in supporting our new project: Women, War & Peace, a mini- television series for THIRTEEN/WNET.ORG. We will focus on women’s strategic role in the post-Cold War era, where globalization, arms trafficking, and illicit trade have intersected to create a whole new type of war. The series will be the most comprehensive global media initiative ever mounted on the current roles of women in war and peace.
Become part of the grassroots support for Women, War & Peace
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The new project is a direct outgrowth of our experience creating PDBH. In making PDBH, we came together around an extraordinary story of women's heroism in wartime, and developed a partnership based on our passionate commitment to the idea that this heroism would not go unnoticed by the world. We didn't really know, until we were in the thick of it, that we had also stumbled into a field that is rife with controversy, virtually unexplored by the broader media, and poised to make a potent contribution to understanding conflict of a new era. And so, as a filmmaking team, we have developed a near obsession with the issue of women, war and peace.
As we found ourselves immersed in the making PDBH, we realized time and again that this story about women's centrality in war, peacemaking, and post-conflict rebuilding was at once both ancient and strikingly contemporary, crucial to understanding local context, yet truly global in its contours. And yet, this story hasn't been told.
These thoughts followed us into the edit room for PDBH - we found that there was a stunning lack of relevant archival materials for us to work with. If we had been making a film about child soldiers, about combat, about warlords, or even about the heroics of the journalists themselves, there would have been no shortage of material. Despite the fact that every eyewitness to the events confirmed, in strikingly similar language, what the women had told us they had done, it appears that mainstream media wasn’t interested, or the footage resulting from those days was not deemed important enough to archive. Ultimately, most of the footage we used that showed the women in action came from private sources.
The difficulty of getting relevant footage from credible public sources highlighted an important reality for us. Everyone we spoke to, from regular citizens to policy leaders, credited these women with enormous influence on the outcome of the peace process and ensuing events, including the disarmament process and the election of Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, and yet that influence was nowhere in the journalistic or official record. And so their accomplishments, however stunning, were doomed to become part of an easily dismissed "mythical" narrative, and not included in history's document of record. The women, in other words were being erased - and right before our eyes.
In order to make sure that this erasure of history doesn’t continue to happen to women in conflict zones around the world, we have joined forces with Pamela Hogan at the New York PBS station THIRTEEN/WNET.ORG, to create Women, War & Peace. We all agree that the need is great, the gap in media coverage is enormous, and the opportunity to do something together is compelling.
Please join us to make this series a reality. Become a PDBH partner to Women, War & Peace. Any contribution you can give is tax deductible and will help guarantee that this series gets completed and seen
around the world.
Thank you,
Gini Reticker and Abigail Disney
» Click here to become part of the grassroots support for
Women, War & Peace
»Click here to read more about Women War & Peace
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