Documentary screens on Uganda’s child soldiers
March 22nd, 2007 by Zsofia
The award-winning documentary “War/Dance” was screened last night in a joint film event by New York’s Museum of Modern Art and the Film Society of Lincoln Center. Directed by the husband-and-wife team Sean Fine and Andrea Nix Fine, “War/Dance” focuses on a group of children in a northern Ugandan refugee camp, who had escaped from the Lord’s Resistance Army.
The documentary film tells the story of three exceptional children and their school in the Patongo refugee camp as they take an historic journey to compete in the annual Kampala Music Festival. Fifty-six schools compete, but only one will go home the champion. No one expects it to be Patongo – schools in the middle of refugee camps don’t win awards.
“The music helps them forget,” said Patongo’s head teacher in the film. The war has stolen so much: their homes, their parents, their childhoods. Patongo’s refugee camp packs 60,000 people in its endless squalor. Close to half of the primary school students had been abducted and forced at gunpoint to beat or kill neighbors, other children and sometimes even their own parents.
The story centres around Rose, 13, the choirgirl trying to piece her life back together after witnessing the brutal aftermath of her parents murder; Dominic, 14, the escaped child soldier and virtuoso xylophone player, forced to murder three people; and Nancy, 12, who kept herself and two younger siblings alive in the bush for a month after the LRA killed their father and abducted their mother. She now dreams of becoming a doctor.
The New York Times has been slightly critical in its description: “The setup sounds obvious at best, a near-caricature of those contemporary social-issue films about Africa in which catastrophe is met with redemption. But the documentary plays out more complexly than its bare bones suggest, largely because the three remarkable children at its center - Rose, Dominic and Nancy - are too individuated to be clichés and too marked by tragedy to become figures of uplift. Their smiles are transitory, ghostly. […] As one disturbing, intrusive scene of a mourning child suggests, the Fines have yet to fully grasp the moral obligations that come into play every time a filmmaker trains a documentary eye on another person. Just because a subject allows you to show her grief doesn’t mean you should. Who, after all, benefits from this image?”
The film won a Sundance award for Documentary Direction in January. It was produced by Shine Global, a US-based non-profit organisation, dedicated to raising awareness about child suffering.
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