The Embassy

A harrowing look into the struggle of liberating a nation from dictatorship.

In a distant war, in a city under siege, U.S. Ambassador John W. Blaney faced a terrible choice: abandon the mission, or risk the lives of his team to give diplomacy one last chance. In 2003, Liberia was one of the most dangerous and isolated countries in the world. President Charles Taylor, a feared warlord, presided over a fractured state of countless unruly militiamen and child soldiers as two rebel armies marched to depose him. When an international court indicted Taylor for war crimes, the rebels attacked the capital and months of vicious fighting ensued.

The Embassy is a graphic and cinematic retelling of the chilling climax of the Liberian civil war and the U.S. and West African role in ending it. Through interviews with the Ambassador and key members of the country team, as well as with peacekeepers, U.S. troops, relief workers, foreign correspondents, senior Liberian officials and rebel leaders, Dante Paradiso reconstructs the violence and chaos of those times to create an enduring portrait of a U.S. embassy under fire and daring frontline diplomacy that changed the fate of a nation.