by SARAH ROWLAND

In every war, whether it be an oil-driven sham, a military coup or a fight for the Holy Land, there’s always one pain-in-the-ass soldier who’s gotta ruin it for everybody else by refusing to kill innocent people on the grounds that it’s “immoral.” Well, that’s what court martials are for: to set these pansies straight.

Sound perverse? Montreal based director Patricio Henriquez seems to think so. He’s the man behind Désobéir, a compelling documentary that follows three shell-shocked soldiers who were imprisoned for listening to their conscience. There’s Igal Vega, a former Israeli soldier who refused to unload a few chambers on a group of unarmed Palestinians. Big mistake. He did serious time for that. And so did Chilean colonel Efrain Jaña, who, in 1973, refused Pinochet’s orders to overthrow the democratically elected president Salvador Allende. Then there’s Camilo Mejía, an American staff sergeant who recently refused to return to Iraq after witnessing his comrades sexually abuse and torture POWS.

All three men retell their stories of disillusionment slowly and methodically, taking breaks to compose themselves. Vega, in particular, struggles to describe the long-term psychological damage of seeing a human being’s head blow up like a smashed melon. In between his subjects’ glaze-eyed testimony, Henriquez unreels disturbing footage and flashes photos of the carnage left behind from their respective wars.

In Mejía’s case, Henriquez also includes interviews of the people who weren’t allowed to testify at his trial, including former United States Attorney General Ramsey Clark. Another powerful moment is when Jaña’s son talks about how his father’s incarceration affected his life.

One could argue that Henriquez presents a very one-sided point of view in that he conveniently doesn’t interview any of the soldiers who were/are left to pick up the slack when their comrades went AWOL. But Désobéir, (“to disobey” in French) doesn’t pretend to be a subjective news piece, but rather an intimate portrait of each man’s personal hell.

As a result it’s not only the kind of film that stays with you long after the images fade to black, it is one of the most thought-provoking Montreal-made docs to hit the big screen in a long time.

Désobéir opens at Ex-Centris Friday, Dec. 2

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