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The Sydney Morning Herald Magazine GOOD WEEKEND February 27, 1999
VALE VALHALLA
Tomorrow, Sydney's Valhalla closes its doors for the last time. The first cinema in the world to produce a fold-out six-month program --- the type once seen attached to hundreds of inner-city refrigerators --- the Valhalla also popularised feature documentaries such as Simone de Beauvoir and The Thin Blue Line. According to owner Chris Kiely, the most successful film screened at the Valhalla in the past 20 years was a documentary, 35 Up, which played for 12 months and took $250,000. Given its long association with great docos, it is only fitting that the Valhalla's final screening should be of the Oscar-nominated Waco: The Rules of Engagement (1997). It coincides with the sixth anniversary of the raid by agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms on the Branch Davidian compound outside Waco, Texas. Four agents and several Branch Davidians (a radical religious sect which broke away from the Seventh Day Adventists) died in the shoot-out and the FBI took over the case. In the media's version of what happened during the next 51 days, the FBI never fired a single shot and the trigger-happy cultists, led by religious fanatic David Koresh, committed mass suicide in a fire. But the film tells a far different story. When producers Dan and Amy Sommer discovered a home movie shot by mainly female Davidians during the siege, they realised that during the siege, they realised that the women were well-spoken and obviously not demented. "We started going, wait a minute, there's something wrong here, this is not what we were told these people were like," Dan Gifford said. Using interviews with survivors, tapes of 911 calls and infra-red surveillance videos shot from above the compound by the FBI, the filmmakers provide damning evidence that the Federal Government's psychological tactics quickly escalated, from blaring out Nancy Sinatra's These Boots are Made for Walking 24 hours a day to using army tanks to run over the graves and, in some cases, the bodies of sect members. Breaching the walls, the tanks then pumped highly flammable (and lethal) CS gas for several hours into the confined kitchen space where the women and children were sheltering. When automatic gunfire coming from sharpshooters outside ignited the wooden compound, FBI authorities refused to let the fire brigade in to extinguish the blaze. This led to the incineration of 76 cult members - including 21 children. To the Branch Davidians, the federal agents represented the evil power referred to in the book of Revelation as "Babylon". Sexual allegations against Koresh and his eschatological preachings from Biblical texts alienated him from the mass media and mainstream sympathy, so that the world readily swallowed the FBIâs's claim that the 27 bullet wounds found on the bodies of sect members were self-inflicted. Influential film critics Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert have called for a Pulitzer Prize for film to be created to honour investigative works like Waco: The Rules of Engagement. "When you see this film," Ebert said, "what's interesting is, if you're looking for people who are unbalanced zealots, you don't find them among the Branch Davidians, you find them among the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms. These are the people who deserve to be feared."
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