![]() Separated from the official LDS Church in order to preserve the practice of polygamy, the fundamentalist group settled in a remote area of Utah. In the beginning, employing a Voice of God narrator and hand-drawn animation that seems out of place from the rest of the documentary, Prophet’s Prey briefly explains the history of the FLDS as a fringe offshoot of the Mormons. broadcast by Showtime, the documentary could also see some foreign TV play, given its depiction of yet another creepy American religious cult. His drawling somnolent voice hovers over the movie like a menacing ghost, ominously intoning prophecies such as “All of you are not going to survive.”Īs a piece of filmmaking, however, the documentary is as drab as the prairie dresses worn by FLDS’s female members. Prophet’s Prey is more effective at presenting the enigmatic figure of the Prophet himself. Whether the sleepy, droning voice of Warren Jeffs, the megalomaniacal leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ Latter Day Saints (FLDS), or the short audio recording that provided undeniable proof of his sexual abuse of adolescent girls, the best moments in the new documentary from Oscar-nominated director Amy Berg ( Deliver Us From Evil) are entirely audio-based. It’s very scary.In the age of Serial, This American Life and the rise of podcasts, the story of Prophet’s Prey would have made for a great radio series. He can dictate something to his mother or one of his wives that comes to visit him. “He gets his prophecies and he passes them on through letters, phone calls. How can Jeffs continue to control the group when he’s incarcerated and under the supervision of the authorities? “It’s a great question,” Berg says. I really just don’t want something awful to happen, because those people don’t deserve it.” You see at the end of the film what the worries are, that something major could happen. ![]() “The bigger issue is that this guy is a maniac and he still has control from prison. “The word of mouth has spread.”īut even though Jeffs is serving a life sentence a state away in Texas, Berg remains deeply worried about his influence on the F.L.D.S. “A hundred women have escaped since the film came out, because Sam is out screening the film and talking to people,” Berg says. Prophet’s Prey, which premiered at Sundance in January and hit theaters in limited release in September, has already had an impact on the community Jeffs left behind. There is another life, if you can kind of get that out early enough.” “In my experience, in doing films that have had victims of sexual abuse in the story, the people that are the most recovered are those who speak out about it at a young age and either find justice by reporting their perpetrator or going to get counseling very close to when the incident happened. The best way to break the cycle, Berg believes, is to bring the abuse to light. “They are just like brothers,” Berg says. members, archival materials including photographs and audio recordings, and the cooperation of two men who have been chasing Jeffs for a decade-the author Jon Krakauer, whose book about the Mormon church, Under the Banner of Heaven, is being adapted into a feature film, and an intrepid private investigator named Sam Brower. “They think everyone else is an enemy and they will never make it to the next life unless they follow the law of whoever their leader is.”ĭespite repeated entreaties, Berg wasn’t able to get Jeffs to cooperate, but she ended up with plenty to work with anyway: interviews with victims and other former F.L.D.S. ![]() “These people know nothing else,” Berg says. The film presents a devastating indictment of Jeffs, but it also raises disturbing questions about his congregation, the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, which continues to allow polygamy more than a century after the larger Mormon church abandoned the practice. ![]() “I’m getting such a bad reputation,” Berg says with a rueful laugh, before pointing out that she also has a big Janis Joplin documentary in the pipeline.īut, first: Prophet’s Prey, which premieres on Showtime tomorrow. Her films have probed priestly pedophilia, child murder, casting-couch molestation in Hollywood, and, now, the monumentally icky case of Warren Jeffs, the Utah religious-sect leader convicted in 2011 of sexually abusing under-age female members of his flock. Oscar-nominated documentarian Amy Berg is not the type to shy away from dark subject matter. ![]()
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