All talk, no action saved Bougainville
fleetingly superb, of course – and the production quality is fine, in a seen-it-all-before way.
What betrays the film is a script that badly needed to be broken down and reassembled into a far leaner and nimbler form than the one presented here.
Although, to be fair, if you see fewer than the 200 films a year I’ve been averaging lately, this might not be such a problem for you.
Before the mining company arrived, Bougainville had been a peaceful and matrilineal nation. Property rights were passed down from mother to daughter, not father to son.
And, as so often in war, it was the women who suffered disproportionately in Bougainville. Nothing empowers a cowardly man to act on his cowardice quite like a gun. Rape became epidemic.
Fourteen peace missions were launched over a decade – and all of them failed.
Soldiers Without Guns is the story of the New Zealand initiative that finally worked.
Working unarmed, the Kiwi forces embarked on a mission of communication. A peace imposed on a people is destined to fail, fast. But a peace grown within a nation might take root.
The New Zealanders – many of whom were women – reached out to the local women on all sides of the conflict. They had far more in common with each other than they did with the men doing the fighting, and this got them talking to each other. The men followed.
Soldiers Without Guns is an engrossing and fascinating film. Auckland-based film-maker Will Watson (Haka and Guitars) weaves his material together well, and Lucy Lawless’ narration tells us what we need to know to understand what we are seeing.
This is a conventional documentary, made without undue flourish, and sometimes that’s exactly what a story needs.
In a great couple of months for local documentary – Celia and
The Heart Dances are superb too – Soldiers Without Guns made me prouder to live in this country than any other film in recent memory. Go see it.