The summer of 2003 saw the peak of a killing frenzy in Liberia in a chaotic civil war that has lasted 15 years. Insurgents were preparing to enter the capital, Monrovia, still held by forces loyal to the increasingly isolated president, Charles Taylor. Soldiers from both camps, most of them teenagers, engaged in urban warfare as bloody as it was desperate, killing thousands of civilians holed up in slums around the city. The international community, preoccupied by Iraq, did nothing, and the American warships on the horizon refused to intervene until Taylor was gone. Considered a model state, founded by freed American slaves, Liberia had been America’s closest ally in Africa. In their visually breathtaking film, containing scenes of extreme brutality, Jonathan Stack and James Brabazon offer a twin perspective on the events: that of the rebels, with whom Brabazon lived, and that from inside Monrovia, filmed by Stack. Extremely tight editing delivers us, tense and revolted, to the heart of the conflict, where we are left sick at heart before the unfolding violence and the world’s indifference to Africa’s wars.