12/3/2023 0 Comments Prophets prey running time![]() (The film is based partly on Brower’s own book Prophet’s Prey, published in 2011.)īerg also explores the mind-set that allows people to be controlled by someone like this. Rather, Prophet’s Prey interweaves the rise of the FLDS and of Jeffs himself, as well as the years-long investigation into the church conducted by journalist Jon Krakauer and private investigator Sam Brower. ![]() ![]() But that aspect of Jeffs’s world isn’t the primary focus here. (Apparently, Warren Jeffs still has real control over the church, even though he’s serving a life sentence.) This isn’t the first film that Berg has made to deal with the nexus of sexual abuse and political/professional/religious power: Her 2006 film Deliver Us from Evil looked at rape in the Catholic Church, and more recently she made An Open Secret, which tackled the molestation of child actors in Hollywood. Those revelations come from one of his victims – a nephew whose father, Warren’s brother Lyle, now nominally runs the church. Jeffs was more than a false prophet and a tyrant he was also a rapist who sexually abused young girls and boys at his church and at the school he founded and ran. Do you split up these families, or do you let them go about living their highly sheltered lives in their church - even though much of that church was built by a charlatan and a criminal? Much of the debate at the time was about what to do with Jeffs’s dozens upon dozens of spouses and children after his arrest. Jeffs, as some may recall, was all over national headlines in 20 when the FBI placed him on its 10 Most Wanted List and then arrested him, revealing to the world his twisted ideology and his army of brainwashed wives (as many as 70 or so). And now, Amy Berg’s new film looks at the rise and fall of cult leader Warren Jeffs, the head of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (FLDS), a splinter group that felt the Mormon Church’s official renunciation of polygamy back in 1890 constituted a betrayal of its principles. “Prophet’s Prey” is a sobering reminder that tyrannical monsters who hide behind religion can be homegrown too.It’s been a big year for documentaries about cults, cranks, and crazies, with the Scientology exposé Going Clear a few months ago and white-supremacist-takeover thriller Welcome to Leith just last week. At one point, we see the FBI most-wanted poster that first included Jeffs, his gaunt, deceptively meek-looking mug at No. Jeffs, whose sonorous, apocalyptic sermons occasionally act as eerie voice-over, continues to run his followers from prison too. The surroundings seem to stare right back, which only bolsters the film’s dispiriting message that for all that’s done to hunt down and bring someone like Jeffs to justice, this subculture of unchecked power and subjugation survives. Threaded throughout is footage taken by Berg’s camera on drives through the dusty streets and along the walled compounds that mark FLDS-run towns on the Utah-Arizona border. Berg’s film also tells the gripping story behind Jeffs’ capture, trial and incarceration. We learn of Jeffs’ beginnings as the scheming heir to self-proclaimed prophet Rulon Jeffs and the autocratic methods he used to control his flock and sanction the rape of young girls.
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