War/ Dance: Musical Dreams After Nightmare
Source: New York Times
Writer: Stephen Holden
“War/Dance,” a visually ravishing documentary that follows a group of schoolchildren from a refugee camp in northern Uganda to a national music competition, raises a fundamental issue for filmmakers confronting unimaginable suffering in war-torn African countries. To what degree should human savagery be softened, sweetened and presented in a spirit of hope to make it palatable to a movie audience?
Every shot in “War/Dance,” much of which was filmed in the Patongo refugee camp in northern Uganda, has the polish of a richly hued, impeccably composed illustration. You wonder why the filmmakers felt obliged to shoehorn so many pretty sunsets into the film, which appears to be admiring itself in a mirror.
These ancestral dances are connected to their homeland and their tribal roots (they are members of the Acholi tribe) and ultimately to their core identity. When they perform the Bwola, the tribe’s intricate, 500-year-old royal dance, you feel its ritual power healing broken lives.
The children are victims of a 20-year civil war that has cost tens of thousands of lives in northern Uganda which the movie, to its detriment, barely mentions and about which it supplies no historical background. Many were abducted from their villages in the middle of the night by the Lord’s Resistance Army, a rebel group that turned kidnapped boys as young as 5 into soldiers and girls into sexual slaves. Many were snatched in front of their parents, and some were forced at gunpoint to beat and kill family members and neighbors.
The movie focuses on three children from the Patongo camp who make the long journey to Kampala in 2005 in trucks guarded by security forces: Rose, a 13-year-old choir singer who witnessed her parents’ murder by the rebels; Nancy, a 14-year-old dancer who took charge of her three younger siblings after her father’s killing and her mother’s abduction; and Dominic, a 14-year-old former child soldier in the Lord’s Resistance Army, whose passion is playing the xylophone.
Once the children reach Kampala, “War/Dance” focuses on the contest, which includes some stirring performances in an atmosphere of high excitement. The film draws out the suspense as best it can until the inevitable African-style “American Idol” moment. If that finale is genuinely exhilarating, you are still uncomfortably aware that this ecstatic conclusion doesn’t mean the end of the strife or the refugees’ troubles. It is a blip of light on a dark canvas.”
*This posting is a series of exerts from an article in the New York Times which is credited and referenced to the authors/sources.
