
The Vice Guide to Liberia
Vice correspondent Shane Smith travels through Monrovia in the aftermath of Liberia's back-to-back civil wars, fourteen years of fighting that left the capital gutted and its institutions barely functioning. He walks through the shell of a five-star hotel turned squat, talks with teenage girls selling themselves for a few dollars, and sits down with kids smoking heroin cut with formaldehyde in an abandoned building locals call a 'zombie house'. The film's most unsettling interview is with Joshua Milton Blahyi, a former warlord known as General Butt Naked, who describes leading child soldiers into battle nude and performing human sacrifices, and who now claims to be an evangelical preacher. Former combatants, many recruited as children, talk about what they did during the war and what there is for them now that it's over. Smith's presence is blunt and unpolished, more gonzo travelogue than formal reportage, but the access is real and the subjects speak for themselves. It leaves Liberia looking like a country still living inside its own aftermath.