War/Dance
"War/Dance" is two documentaries struggling uneasily against each other. The one that wins - the only one that matters, really - is a devastatingly emotional saga about Ugandan children of war reclaiming their lives. This "War/Dance" is among the most affecting films I've seen all year; it cuts to the core of being and gives individual faces to sorrow and to hope.
The other "War/Dance" is the product of well-intentioned filmmakers trying to make African suffering palatable to Western audiences. It's problematic, to say the least. Co-directors Sean Fine and Andrea Nix Fine stuff the story of the kids of Patongo Refugee Camp in northern Uganda into the foolproof, crowd-pleasing confines of a contest doc like "Spellbound" or "Mad Hot Ballroom," even when it doesn't fit.
They pose the children in exquisitely shot tableaux and have them speak in voice-over while staring at the camera. There are staged confrontations, possibly reenactments, and an awful lot of gorgeous sunsets. The whole thing feels Benetton-ized.
Yet all the currying of our presumably jaded favor can't blunt the impact of the experiences seen and related here. "War/Dance" covers the run-up to the 2005 National Music Competition in Kampala, and the preparations at the camp's primary school. The children are all refugees, many of them orphans, some of them former child soldiers - victims of a lopsided 20-year war between the government and the Lord's Resistance Army in which the peaceful Acholi tribe has taken the worst beating of all.
The numbers are appalling: 200,000 children without parents, 30,000 abducted into the LRA, 90 percent of all Acholis forced to relocate from family farms to camps. To sidestep the statistical numb-out, the filmmakers focus on three kids in Patongo. Nancy, 14, tells of her father being slaughtered in his field and her mother forced to bury the pieces. Rose, 13, saw both parents murdered and now works like a Cinderella for a peremptory aunt. Dominic, 14, was taken from his school and only reluctantly opens up about some of the horrors he saw and committed.
If these stories are almost paralyzing in their inhumanity, the children's immersion in music and dance is deeply moving. Art is all that connects them to their people, to each other, and to life. Nancy is part of the Traditional Dance troupe, performing her tribe's 500-year-old bwola dance, while Rose sings in the Western Choral competition. Dominic is a gifted xylophone player who totes his handcrafted instrument everywhere and who dreams of his name being known throughout Uganda.
Because Patongo is the remotest of the camps, the competition's organizers send two coaches from Kampala to polish the performances. "War/Dance" works up suspense along familiar kid-competition documentary lines as it builds to the climactic showdown in the capital city. These scenes awkwardly coexist with sequences in which Nancy, Rose, and Dominic tell their personal histories and with dramatic moments that may or may not be staged.
Dominic, for instance, is taken to meet a captured rebel soldier, whom he grills for news of his brother and confronts over the LRA's abduction of children. It's a remarkable scene but oddly placid, like a replay of events that might have happened before the cameras were turned on. Similarly, when Nancy visits her father's grave you feel the filmmakers' intrusiveness as awfully as you do the girl's sobs; when she walks away from the camera, it's the movie's most human moment.
To play devil's advocate: There's a language barrier here and it's cinematic rather than linguistic. "War/Dance" doesn't show Africa with the handheld camerawork and direct sound most of us unconsciously accept as documentary reality. It feels too mediated. Yet who's to say one construct is more truthful? If the essence of a lived experience comes through, isn't that what matters?
It comes through in this movie, despite the Fines' attempts to glossy it up and sell it to us. The expressions on the faces of the Patongo kids as they perform in Kampala goes beyond agenda and intent into a joy so hard-won it's almost too profound to contemplate. As the team rolls into the final day of competition, Dominic crows, "We are going to show them we are giants." I guess he doesn't know they already have.
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