TV review: True Stories/The World's Most Dangerous Place For Women

Published on Tuesday 30 March 2010 19:03

True Stories: A Long Weekend With The Son Of God, More4 The World's Most Dangerous Place For Women, BBC3

IN SIBERIA there's a man who says he is the reborn son of God and thousands of people believe him. He may not have walked on water but he's said to have walked barefoot in the depths of Siberian winter, which is pretty miraculous. He used to be a policeman and once captured a murderer with his "hypnotic" voice; now he uses it to preach comforting platitudes to his faithful followers.

The self-proclaimed new Christ calls himself Vissarion, a name uncomfortably close to Yossarian, the hero of Joseph Heller's Catch-22, and indeed elements of George Carey's fascinating documentary, A Long Weekend With The Son Of God, were similarly absurd satire.

The worshippers live in fairytale-looking villages where they build their own gingerbread houses, grow their own food and use solar power. It's a version of the Gaia belief in Earth as a self-regulating organism, but they believe that bad thoughts contribute to pollution too.

Watching them dance around in a circle, the women and girls in long dresses with flowers in their hats, was so much like a scene from The Wicker Man that I feared for Carey. But all that happened was that their messiah came down from his mountain home for the anniversary of when his "true identity" was revealed to him.

Some of the rituals they practise, it's alleged, are simply borrowed from the classic 1970s ITV serial Jesus Of Nazareth, which was apparently bootlegged all over Russia.

That's the one which starred Robert Powell, to whom Vissarion bears a slight resemblance, with his long hair and beard, white gown and mild, beatific expression. It is probably just as well that Powell's later role alongside Jasper Carrot in The Detectives was never seen over there.

The closer he looks to their preconceptions of Jesus, his disciples argue, the easier it is for people to believe. Jesus, mind you, did not wear socks with sandals (though he also didn't live in Siberia).

It was, perhaps, an over-long weekend with the son of God – the documentary could have lost half an hour. But the strength of Carey's film was in its tone, not mocking the faithful, yet showing the downright weirdness of their wilderness life.

There is, of course, the catch-22: women's place in this new religion is – and what a surprise here – subservient. Vissarion preaches the "beauty of submission" of them to men and of men to him. Not so new after all, then.

The World's Most Dangerous Place For Women was a frightening film about a young British woman – all hair straighteners, mobile phone and sass – revisiting Congo, which she left when she was three. After a pleasant reunion with her parents, poor Judith struggled to take in a succession of grim guided tours to the east of the country, where at least 200,000 women have been raped as deliberate strategy of war.

She heard terrible stories from former child soldiers and rape survivors and finally crumbled when told "this tiny, tiny, beautiful girl" – a child, about five, playing with Judith's plastic water bottles – had been raped and has HIV. The story was even worse than that: the girl was herself conceived from a rape, the cycle of brutality repeating.

Stunned, the articulate Judith returned resolving to speak out about what she'd seen. This was the much-maligned (and usually rightly so) BBC3 at its best.