FILM STILLS: SLIDING LIBERIA

Fair warning: Sliding Liberia reduced everyone here at FOAM HQ to tears. The very subject of this graceful little documentary—life in the war-ravaged Western African nation of Liberia —is enough to make even the hardest-hearted cynic cry. The film follows Nicholai Lidow on a pilgrimage to Liberia, a nation he’s felt an affinity for since meeting some of its refugees when he spent some time in nearby Ghana during his student days.

Lidow and a handful of friends (among them our Role Model Crystal Thornburg – see page TK) ramble about the country, meeting people and doing what they love: surfing. On the one hand, this flick is an enchanting and unflinching travelogue for those of us not fortunate enough to have traipsed around Africa, showing us the country’s natural beauty as well as the developing world’s uglier realities.

The best thing Lidow and his crew discover, of course, is the people. We meet Alfred, a handsome young Liberian who stumbled upon a body board in the nation’s capitol of Monrovia while searching for food. For him, surfing (or sliding, as he calls it) is liberation from the grim realities of life in Robertsport, a remote Atlantic coastal village blessed with some truly mind-boggling waves. We also meet Dorothy Schellart, who so eloquently gives voice to the plight of those crushed beneath the grisly historical legacy of shortsighted colonial policy: “What we want is peace.”

What the film also shows us though, is the surf. Nature can be debased—and what is war if not the ugliest act of man against the world itself?—but nature endures, as we see firsthand. The sight of naked little boys teetering on a board is positively Edenic, and reassuring, too, for no matter what else happens in the world, the waves keep rolling in.

View the trailer here.