Prophets prey book12/21/2023 Jeffs with persuasive witness testimony and documentation. Herzog ratcheted up the drama by withholding the recording, but his decision was also a de facto ethical statement about documentary and the uses of the suffering of others.įor the most part, though, Ms. This decision contrasts sharply with the scene in the documentary “Grizzly Man,” when an on-camera Werner Herzog listens to - but doesn’t share - an audio recording of the mauling death of two people. Jeffs’s trial of him allegedly molesting a 12-year-old girl was wrong. She makes smart choices throughout as she weaves together this chronicle of faith and abuse, but her decision to include an audio recording that was used at Mr. Berg has created an unnerving, sometimes infuriating documentary. In “Prophet’s Prey” there’s little evidence of love in what emerges as a tale of madness and abuse, wealth and criminality, mixed in with anti-government rhetoric - all in in the name of God.ĭrawing on archival material, landscape beauty shots and testimonials, including from former F.L.D.S. Their old-timey look will be familiar to fans of the HBO drama “Big Love,” about a polygamous family trying to find a middle way between faith and the modern world. Berg fills in a harrowing portrait of Warren Jeffs as a deluded prophet and serial abuser, especially of girls and women who seem locked in another century. Krakauer and Sam Brower, another dogged investigator, Ms. Jeffs, who in 2002 assumed leadership of the church after the death of his father, Rulon Jeffs. The documentary tracks the rise and fall of Mr. Krakauer, a guiding voice in the documentary, is still on the case. His book, “Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith,” hit in 2003, but Mr. This curious sight led him on a journalistic investigation into Mormonism and its extremes, including the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (F.L.D.S.), a breakaway sect with thousands of polygamous true believers in the United States, Canada and Mexico. There, he saw a group of women dressed in the sort of long prairie dresses that Laura Ingalls Wilder might have worn if she had liked frocks stitched out of pastel polyester. As he explains in “Prophet’s Prey,” his interest in these particular fundamentalists was sparked when, in 1999, he stopped at a gas station close to Colorado City and Hildale. The writer Jon Krakauer didn’t get the message. To watch “Prophet’s Prey,” Amy Berg’s tough and disturbing documentary about a secretive, polygamous Mormon fundamentalist sect with unsettling roots in the region, is to grasp, perhaps, the unspoken reason the Arizona tourism office seems to be suggesting that visitors drive right on by. Set at the base of ravishing red cliff mountains, the city and its twin, Hildale, Utah, look straight out of Canaan. The chief attraction of Colorado City, or so it would seem from the brief entry on the website of the Arizona Office of Tourism, isn’t Colorado City but the “nearby scenic attractions” that include the Vermilion and Shinarump Cliffs.
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