Follow The Prophet (Drew Ann Rosenberg, 2009):USA

Reviewed by Aleksandra Mraovic. Viewed at The Santa Barbara Film Festival.

A strong independent movie about a topic that not many people are familiar with, Polygamy. Follow The Prophet is an interesting movie that tells an important story about communities in America that live under different circumstances. The movie is very interesting and informative and everybody should go see it.

Who will save the children? Children that are raised to serve and follow the prophet’s principles. If you follow and obey the principles of the prophet, you will not be led astray. You will be loved by God and there will always be a place in heaven for you. This is what the children are taught to believe. The dark side of polygamy is that as soon as you become a woman, who they consider a girl at the age of 15 to be, you will marry a 60 year old man and carry his children. Having 50 siblings is not a strange occurrence in the communities. Avery (Anne Burgstede) makes a very good performance in the movie playing the 15 year old girl that escapes from the Polygamist community. Her father tries to rape her so that he can prepare her for the Prophet. She runs away from home and gets help from Jude (Robert Chimento) and the officer Red played by (Diane Venora). She finds out that the Prophet will take the next girl in line, which is her younger sister. She returns to her family to save her younger sister and pretends to have come to her sense.

Follow the Prophet is very similar to the movie In God´s Country. A mother that runs away from a Polygamist community and seeks help so that she can protect her children from the Prophet. There are also documentaries based on the same story. One frustrating thing about the movie is that a couple of scenes are very short. You don´t get to see the whole scenes and it feels like the director speeds up the event in the movie. It is not hard to notice this and it is disturbing for a spectator. Otherwise, the director Drew Ann Rosenberg has made the movie very convincing and interesting.

As I mentioned before, the movie is very good and informative. It´s fascination to see how people with different values and different lifestyles live. That these types of religious groups do exist and live their lives totally different from what we are used to.