Response to "When the Mountains Tremble"

            When the Mountains Tremble is a powerful documentary.  The events are extreme and devastating.  I wish I had time to re-watch it before our discussion to better synthesize it.  The devastation felt powerful enough that I didn’t keep track of the timeline and historical perspective as much as I’d like to.  That's something I definitely kept coming back to - I just felt devastated after watching, and a reexamination might be necessary to better examine such an extreme and sad circumstance.

            One moment that stood out to me early on is when the young boy soldier was interviewed alongside the road.  When asked why he was fighting, he didn’t have any concrete answer, just that it was his duty.  He seemed to laugh it off a little.  It felt powerful that the fighting was so ingrained into society that he didn’t fully have an answer to the question.  For those fighting against the government control, though, the reasoning felt more clear - they wanted their freedom and for the hostility to stop - but this was complicated by how many different groups existed.

            Towards the end, we saw a town where the government fighters came in and killed all the male patriarchs in the families.  It seemed to me that they did not ask or make a distinction between who was on their side and who was on the other side before slaughtering so many people.  Then, after the men were killed, we saw a group of women who became fighters – who I think were in that town or from that region.  I felt like the women, and most people in the movie fighting, had become more empowered by how fiercely they were suppressed.  They had lost so much that they had a lot of fire behind what they were fighting for.  Then, the movie ended with a man who said, hopefully, that because there were so many of them fighting “we will win.”

            I like that the movie ended hopefully, but I also can’t help feeling fearful for them – that if they will "win," it will still be a long and painful transition towards something like freedom.  There wasn’t only two groups fighting against each other – even if some groups had similar goals, there were many communities involved in the fighting that all seemed to make up their own branches.  The movie, primarily, made me want to do more research to know more about this fighting.  I also, again, would love to rewatch the movie to better synthesize the order of everything.

         The pictures that the children drew were also powerful.  It was sad to see their interpretation of the world so violent - so honest.