Wall of Peace (2023)
★ — Wall of Peace (2023)
Liberian cinema rarely finds its way onto Western review sites, which makes Wall of Peace (2023) a genuinely unusual watch. Directed by Luther N. Mafalleh, this short drama runs to just seventeen minutes and is set against the social pressures that surround marriage and divorce in contemporary Liberia. The story follows Nula, a young woman who watches her mother suffer at the hands of an abusive husband and tries to push her towards leaving, only to find that the fear of community stigma can be as paralysing as the abuse itself. It is a subject with real weight behind it, the kind of material that has powered some of the most affecting drama films of recent years, and it places Wall of Peace in broad company with other socially conscious shorts and features from the Global South.
The film is a production whose studio background is unlisted, which is not unusual for low-budget short filmmaking from regions where the industry is still finding its feet. Liberia has no long-established commercial film infrastructure in the way that, say, Nigeria's Nollywood does, and films like this one tend to emerge from small, community-rooted productions rather than anything resembling a studio system. Luther N. Mafalleh takes the director's chair, though his wider body of work is not well documented in the usual international databases. The principal cast is made up of Esther Toe, Tracy T. Mason, and Johnny B. Toe. For viewers who have been working through a broader diet of world drama, the film sits in an interesting corner alongside other recent short-form and festival work from outside the usual European and American circuits. If you have already read the site's coverage of Tiger Stripes (2023) or Megdan: Between Water and Fire (2024), you will have a sense of the kind of territory this film is attempting to occupy.
On paper, a seventeen-minute drama tackling domestic violence and the social stigma of divorce is a perfectly reasonable short film premise. Whether the execution lives up to the intention is, of course, another matter entirely, and that is where the author's own assessment comes in.
A-Z World Movie Tour Liberia FIRST LETTERBOXD REVIEW I really don't want to be harsh here but this was awful. The subject matter is domestic violence basically. The acting is absolutely terrible. The daughter acts like she's delirious in every scene (despite that not being the role) and the Mum's eating is like something out of a George Romero movie It's just bad on practically every single level. Even the microphones getting bashed from time to time is left in. An all round terrible short
I do think it is worth separating the ambition from the result here, because the subject matter genuinely deserves better than what is on screen. There is a real story to tell about women trapped not just by a violent partner but by the weight of what their neighbours and community will think, and that tension is, if anything, more relevant and urgent now than ever. But good intentions do not paper over poor execution, and when the technical and performance problems are this persistent, they get in the way of any emotional truth the film might otherwise carry. I will always make time for cinema from countries that rarely get a look in on the international circuit, and I will keep seeking out Liberian films as the world movie tour continues. This one, though, is a miss. Sometimes the most honest thing you can say is: try again.
Rating: ★ | Year: 2023 | Watched: 2025-06-29
Related on Movies With Macca
More from the 2020s: Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain (2024) · Mononoke the Movie: Chapter II - The Ashes of Rage (2025) · The Long Walk (2025) · Americana (2023)
More drama: Viy (1967) · Wonder (2017) · A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Beautiful Boy (2018)
