Monseñor: The Last Journey of Óscar Romero

Shot over six weeks in December 1971, and January 1972, the film consisted of interviews with Protestants, Catholics, politicians, and some soldiers, combined with TV news clips of bombings and violence. The deaths of four individuals formed the central focus of the film, which Ophüls described as ‘an old, middle-aged, humanistic, social-democratic attempt to give people an idea that life after all is not that cheap’. The BBC refused to transmit the completed film on the grounds that it was ‘too pro-Irish’ (Sunday Times, 5 Nov. 1972). (via http://cain.ulst.ac.uk/othelem/media/docs/freespeech.htm)

The film begins with the exhumation of four American women tortured, raped, and murdered by the right-wing government of El Salvador on December 2, 1980. The women — Dorothy Kazel, an Ursuline; Ita Ford and Maura Clarke, Maryknoll mission sisters; and Jean Donovan, a young laywoman from Cleveland — were providing food, shelter, medical care and burial to the poor. They were targeted for assassination by a death squad within the U.S.-supported Salvadoran military as part of a policy of suppressing the poor and “liberation theology.” The award-winning documentary focuses primarily on the life of Jean Donovan through archival news footage, interviews, home movies, and diary readings.

This exceptional, disturbing, and thought-provoking two-part documentary compares the atrocities committed by the Nazis as revealed during the Nuremberg trials to those committed by the French in Algeria and those done by the Americans in Vietnam. The four-hour epic questions the right of any country to pass self-righteous moral judgements upon the actions of another country.

This documentary goes back to the turn of the century to show how women shaped the nation’s history.