Filming a Continent on Fire

In the past, when Hollywood brought Africa to the big screen, the continent and its people served as an epic backdrop for a sweeping drama --- Out of Africa or The English Patient. The stories usually centred on whites who lived in an unquestioned colonial Africa.

More recently, when Africa hit the big screen in a big way again, African issues and characters took a more central role. But in films like Hotel Rwanda, Lord of War, The Interpreter and The Constant Gardener, issues of genocide, HIV/AIDS, arms and international conflict provide the story's drama -- a trend that, while more true to current African reality, may leave the viewer with the impression that Africa is little more than a continent of catastrophe.

While Africa certainly has more than its fair share of challenges, a new breed of documentary filmmakers is telling Africa's stories on African terms. Intent on staying true to the African voice, they portray the continent as it is: challenged, but with a tenacious and resilient people able to help themselves, a continent with dignity and humanity, a continent from which audiences might actually have something to learn, not just something to gain.

Filming the invisible

Invisible Children: The Rough Cut is one of the latter kind. It's an adventure-documentary by three young film school grads from California who travel to Africa to find a story. Buying a camera off eBay, the "boys" (Jason Russell, Bobby Bailey and Laren Poole) set out to document the effect of the Sudanese conflict on the people of Darfur --- only to find out when they arrive that their story has, for the most part, fled into Northern Uganda.

On April 29, thousands of people across North America --- including Vancouver -- will walk to a designated location in their city where they will sleep on the ground overnight. Called the Global Night Commute, the trek is meant to replicate the nightly journey children in Northern Uganda must make to the relative safety of the city in order to escape abduction by rebel soldiers.

They trek back to Uganda intent on finding the Sudanese refugees, but instead encounter a more compelling story --- a rebel army that is terrorizing its own people, the Acholi. Forced to turn back when a truck in their path is attacked by soldiers from this Lord's Resistance Army (or LRA as it is commonly known), the boys spend the night in Gulu, a city in Northern Uganda. Here, they witness a startling phenomenon: a stream of children who pour into Gulu each night to sleep wherever they can --- in verandahs, bus depots, hospitals, empty schools. They sleep packed together, without parents or adults, many of them having traveled miles without food.

Comfortably crying

Although, up to this point, the tale has been somewhat self-indulgent and gratuitous, (in Sudan the boys do little more than kill a snake, set fire to a termite mound and vomit a lot) the film starts to picks up pace. We are drawn into the lives of these night commuters as they share their daily routines, fears, stories of abduction and dreams. Through a montage of drawings --- some done by LRA abductees --- we learn the history of this strange war, how children as young as five are brutally desensitized into child soldiers capable of committing horrific atrocities. We also experience the humour, resilience and loyalty of these kids who walk, sleep and do their homework together and look out for each other like family.

So when one of these kids, a former rebel soldier on the run, breaks down sobbing in the middle of an interview with the filmmakers and continues to cry uncontrollably for the next many seconds, the effect is devastating. One child, weeping, becomes all the others who have lived under this brutality and have not been comforted. Off screen, we hear the filmmakers choking back tears.

"These kids never cry," says Laren Poole, the filmmaker. "That's how they protect themselves. We felt we had become friends with him --- that he let down his walls and became vulnerable. For a second, you feel the gravity of the situation."

Because of the film's style, this moment stands out in relief. The filmmakers have gone out of their way to poke fun at themselves and expose their naiveté. As much as this is the story of the children of Acholiland, it is also the story of three young Californians finding purpose in Africa.

The film is gaining an audience in both the U.S. and Canada, spreading with viral efficiency through the efforts of students who buy the film online. A continuation of their adventure, known as Invisible Children: The Final Cut will be released next summer through what the filmmakers hope will be major distribution.

'Stolen Children, Hidden War'

Another film, Stolen Children, Hidden War, emerged as the Canadian answer to Invisible Children. In 2004, North Vancouver filmmaker Tim Hardy sat down with former Foreign Affairs Minister Lloyd Axworthy to talk about making a film on the conflict between Eritrea and Ethiopia, in which Axworthy has been active as a peace negotiator. "Not Ethiopia, not Eritrea," Axworthy told Hardy. "You need to do a film on what's going on in Northern Uganda."

Two years and 12 different cuts back and forth with an Acholi advisory board later, the documentary is "as close to the authentic voice of the Acholi people as we could get," Hardy says.

More conventional in style than Invisible Children's MTV beat, Stolen Children, Hidden War is nonetheless unique not only for its predominantly non-Western cast of characters, but also for the way it delves into the background of the Northern Uganda struggle. Not only does the film dig into divisions in Uganda extant since British colonialism, but it also looks at the colonial history of the entire African continent, shedding light on the root of conflicts in both Rwanda and Sudan.

Stolen Children, Hidden War is by no means an easy film to watch, given its graphic depictions of brutality as well as the way it implicates the viewer. Citing the "European hunger for African resources," the film explores the colonial "divide and conquer" legacy that has been replicated by Ugandan leaders from independence until today, where Southern Bantu-speaking Ugandans are pitted against Acholi and Langi northern tribes.

'Never again'

In perhaps the most crucial line in the film, current Ugandan president Yoweri Museveni is accused of having conspired with LRA leader Joseph Kony to "eliminate" the Acholi people. Similarly, it fingers leaders in both the LRA and the Sudanese rebel movements as having been Museveni's personal university or military colleagues. Museveni, of course, has been praised as a model African leader by US presidents. Since the September 11th terrorist attacks, the film contends, Bush has given him unconditional support as a key player on the "frontline on terror": Uganda's border with Sudan. What Museveni does within his own borders, however, is conveniently overlooked.

"We're the ones who said 'never again' right after the Holocaust and Rwanda," Hardy says, "yet we allow these crimes against humanity to happen right under our nose." Although the film asks why the war continues "I don't ever want to assume I or we have the answers," Hardy says. "I prefer to focus in on the positive efforts of the locals rather than present a Western solution. My objective is to be a voice for the people affected and to show their joy and hope in spite of their situation --- which to us is remarkable." Stolen Children, Hidden War will premiere in early June. Lions Gate Films is currently looking at partnering with the film, which has also been accepted to Hot Docs Canadian International Documentary Film Festival.

'A Song for Sudan'

Born in Jerusalem a decade after the Holocaust, North Vancouver filmmaker Erez T. Yanuv Barzilay says the need to document acts of genocide is a calling that "chose" him fifteen years ago when he was sent to cover the story of breaking peace in Cambodia for an Israeli news channel. Walking in the "killing fields" he also was haunted by the thought: "how could this happen 25 years after the Holocaust --- didn't we say 'never again'?" The question has compelled him to film genocide the world over and is the reason he found himself in Southern Sudan in 1998 filming A Cry For Madiom.

On first impression, A Cry For Madiom is an unusual film, about as far from the previous two film's documentary style as one can get. There is little narration, no fast cutting and no slick soundtrack. Instead, the viewer is plunged without comment into in a remote feeding centre in Ajiep, a village in Southern Sudan near the Darfur border, for 24 hours. Engulfed in largely unedited, unnarrated sequences, the viewer slowly begins to relax into the pace of the feeding centre where the sounds and songs of the day --- punctuated by the constant coughing of children --- serve as the film's only soundtrack.

Mothers wait hours in the sun to have their child assessed to determine if they will be able to receive supplemental feeding rations. A little girl picks the husk off her treasure of five corn seeds. The film's title character, Madiom Madiok, looks up a Yanuv Barzilay's camera and laughs a delighted laugh, incongruent with the grave setting. Yanuv Barzilay's hand reaches out from behind the camera, any one of his fingers bigger than Madiom's emaciated little wrist. Madiom's mother's face lights up with a smile and she gestures, clearly indicating that even in the midst of tragedy, her son can laugh.

'Maybe tomorrow'

When Madiom is finally assessed, his five-year-old body weighs only 7.4 kilos, skeletal for his 82 cm. Yanuv Barzilay barely restrains outrage as Madiom is sent away with only oral rehydrating solution and milk. He will receive food "maybe tomorrow," the harried Belgian nurse from Medecins Sans Frontiers tells us. "Why do you ask such questions?" she bristles. Clearly she is doing her best with an unstable food supply in a remote area ravaged by drought and instability.

It's risky filmmaking, risky because it trusts that the viewer is intelligent enough to put it together. Stark and haunting, the film's subtlety is its power. True, the film is full of images that are anathema to many of the filmmakers in this story: starving, bloated children, flies in their eyes. But Yanuv Barzilay has managed to take 24 hours in a crisis that has been ongoing for 40 years and turn it into a something lyrical. A Cry For Madiom achieves something rarely seen in filmmaking: visual lament. In the ancient tradition of sorrow and loss, Madiom is a song of lament --- strikingly offset by the joyful singing of the children and women in the feeding centre. By no means a dirge, it is a song of the beauty and dignity of humanity, and of that loss --- the only fitting response to an inhumane crisis where upwards of 40 children are dying a day and where death is so commonplace it goes nearly unacknowledged.

Yanuv Barzilay admits that in making Madiom he "broke all the rules" --- both of filmmaking and of his own personal ethic. "I expose the victims by showing things I normally don't dare to document out of respect for the moment and the victim. But I also expose myself by using the footage as taken, not even editing out my mistakes with the camera." He felt it necessary to do this because, even though it has been eight years since he filmed Madiom "this is not one moment in life, this is the face of the genocide in Sudan for the last 50 years, yet nobody reports on it, nobody shows it, nobody cares," he says. "My goal was to share the actual experience of being there so that people could feel even ten percent of what I felt."

A Cry For Madiom has won four international film festival awards, including Best International Documentary at the Tuskegee Film Festival in February and was selected to the International Documentary Film Festival in Amsterdam. The film will be screened at the Red Cross Film & Speaker series at the Burnaby Public Library, Metrotown on May 10, 7pm.

Hope Rising in Rwanda

Sudan and Uganda are not the only countries in this region of Africa that have seen genocide. The history of the Rwandan genocide is by now well known, but the story of how the country is rebuilding itself has been little told. Another Vancouver-based documentary, Hope Rising, intends to fill that gap.

Structured around the story of Nicholas and Elsie Hitimana --- a Hutu/Tutsi couple who narrowly escaped Rwanda during the genocide and vowed never to return --- Hope Rising tells of the others like them who have returned with a passion to rebuild their country on its own merits. "The Rwandese decided that this was their war and this was their recovery," coffee importer Arthur Karuletwa says in the film. "If we don't do this ourselves and keep on putting the hand out, it's gonna be a long time before we recover."

The documentary, by White Rock filmmaker Trevor Meier, is still in post-production with a target release date of late summer; however a segment was released in early April. Meier says the documentary will be an answer to the question posed by Romeo Dallaire's Shake Hands With the Devil: are some human beings worth less than others? "I want people to see the Rwandans and be impressed and inspired by them," he says. "They have been through so much, yet they have so much ability to give." He hopes that the Rwandans' dignity and intelligence evident in the film will help counter the "poor Africa" theme often found in mainstream media coverage of the continent.

In fact, these four films show that Africa is rich, not only in resources, but also in intangibles --- relationships, humanity, joy --- in which the West is poor by comparison. Meier points out the poverty of a Western way of looking at relationship "If I am only valuable insofar as a I have something to offer you that fulfills your selfish goals, then I'm not valuable just because I'm a human being," he says. Any possibility of true connectedness is lost when people relate to each other as a means to their narcissistic ends. He points out that the values that make Western lives more empty are the very values that cause countries to exploit one another or ignore genocide. "We have this perception in North America that we're the top of the food chain, that we have it all together. That's an attitude that needs to be humbled a bit," Meier says. "I hope that will happen by viewers seeing the example of Rwandans."

Meg Johnstone is a freelance writer.