2013 Top Ten List #5 War Witch (Rebelle)

WAR WITCH (Rebelle)           A 

Canada  (90 mi)  2012  d:  Kim Nguyen              Official site

There are well over 9 million refugees and otherwise displaced people from conflicts in Africa, where five and a half million have died in the Congo alone since the outbreak of fighting in August 1998, becoming the world’s deadliest conflict since World War II.  If this scale of destruction was in Europe, it would already be called World War III, with the United Nations and world leaders rushing to provide food, doctors, humanitarian aid and various peace plans to help stabilize the region.  But Africa is largely ignored, even though the conflict in one country affects many other neighboring nations that must support a continuing stream of refugees, becoming a world humanitarian crisis that is also largely underfunded.  The vast majority die of non-violent causes such as malaria, malnutrition, diarrhea, and pneumonia, all preventable diseases caused by military conflicts, where nearly half the deaths are children, more than 200,000 women have been raped, where on average some 45,000 continue to die every month, nearly the amount of Americans that died in the Vietnam War.  Shocking figures anywhere else in the world, but in Africa we have all too easily come to accept this ongoing human atrocity.  In fact, the world may actually benefit from this regional destabilization, where powerful, influential nations find it easier to pluck precious resources from a war-torn nation, such as blood diamonds, including the Millennium Star, the second largest ever discovered, where the Congo still exports nearly 10% of the world’s diamonds, the precious commodity people are losing their lives over.  As with most conflicts in Africa, the current situation is likely caused by the lingering aftereffects of colonialism, where as recently as 1961, the Belgium colonial rulers and their longtime financial partner, the United States, imprisoned and executed the first democratically elected leader of the Congo just 12 weeks after the election, Patrice Lumumba, a revolutionary advocate for independence from Belgium, whose government officially apologized in 2002.  The United States remains silent on their participation.  A military puppet was installed, Col. Joseph Desire Mobutu, a corrupt and self-serving opportunist who maintained a brutal reign, receiving military assistance from America under the ruse that it was to prevent a Communist takeover, becoming the second richest leader in the world, behind only the Shah of Iran, another American installed puppet.  Allowing the nation’s resources to be harvested by the world’s richest and most powerful nations left the actual Congolese people destitute and wretchedly impoverished.  That is the legacy of colonialism and the root of most all conflicts in Africa.    

Kinshasa was just a small fishing village located on the Congo River, while now it’s the third largest city in Africa (behind Cairo and Lagos) with 9 million inhabitants, also the second largest French-speaking urban area in the world after Paris, where French continues to be the language of newspapers, schools, and the government, where it could exceed Paris in population within a decade.  Director Kim Nguyen, currently living in Montreal, was born and raised in French-speaking Quebec in Canada to a Vietnamese father who emigrated to Canada in the early 60’s and a French Canadian mother.  Perhaps as a way of getting a better understanding of his own Vietnamese war-torn heritage, Nguyen spent 10 years interviewing many of the child soldiers living in Kinshasa, developing a script based on the firsthand testimony of what they endured, eventually making a film about the unspeakable realities that exist for child soldiers.  This familiar terrain was also explored in Mahamat-Saleh Haroun’s Chad Civil War Trilogy, ABOUNA (2002), Daratt (Dry Season (2006), and 2010 Top Ten Films of the Year: #2 A Screaming Man (Un homme qui crie), also Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire’s Johnny Mad Dog (2008), where a 15-year old boy leads a band of children carrying AK-47 assault rifles during the Sierre Leone civil war crisis.  These are all beautifully shot films that involve the conscription of young children who are kidnapped by heavily armed warlords looking to fortify their ranks and send them off to the front, which is exactly how this film opens in the adrenaline-laced opening few moments.  Nguyen adopted a technique working with child actors inherited from Andrea Arnold in FISH TANK (2009), where she was able to achieve outstanding natural performances from non-professionals by shooting chronologically, releasing only that part of the script needed for each day’s shoot.  The biggest difference in Nguyen’s film is the use of a young female lead character, Rachel Mwanza, where instead of a young male soldier emulating older males, young girls have literally no one to look up to and are easily victimized sexually by other male soldiers. 

While the film was shot in the Democratic Republic of Congo, using some mesmerizing beautiful locations, the country is never named in the film, as it is a fictionalized composite of any African country in turmoil.  The actress Rachel Mwanza was in real life abandoned by her parents at 5 or 6, lived with her grandmother for awhile but ended up living on the streets of Kinshasa, which is where she was living when the director held a public audition.  Mwanza is unforgettable as Komono, winner of the Best Actress at the 2012 Berlin Festival, endlessly tormented by the war, where the film follows her for three years beginning at age 12, a mere child one moment, and in an instant, a knife placed to her throat, she must kill or be killed, where her village is literally wiped out by marauding invaders in a matter of minutes, where what they came for is not money, resources, or food, but more children to fill their ranks, where the younger age makes them easier to brutalize, intimidate, and brainwash, training them to work collectively at the behest of a strong rebel leader that is rarely ever seen, as they are the front line troops.  At first treated like everybody else, Komono is taught the use of an automatic weapon, but what she discovers after drinking what she calls “magic milk, extracted from certain leaves in the forest, is the ability to see and communicate with the spirits of the dead, including her own parents that she was reluctantly forced to shoot back in her village.  This element alters the interior landscape that Komono describes as she narrates, mixing searing realism with a more poetic sensibility, where as the sole survivor of a firefight after being warned by the ghosts to run, the rebel leader, known as the Grand Tigre Royal (aka:  Great Tiger, Mizinga Mwinga), describes her as a “war witch,” believing she has mystical powers and can sense the presence of the enemy.  She becomes the most valuable prized possession among the troops, where anyone causing her harm has to answer to the Great Tiger.  She becomes best friends with an albino soldier known as the Magician (Serge Kanyinda), as he carries with him charms and small pouches of various herbs and roots that offer potent spells.  After they miraculously survive a heavy firefight, just a small handful of ragtag survivors against a vastly superior enemy force, the Magician convinces her that the Great Tiger can’t be trusted and they need to escape. 

A richly complex and profoundly significant film that offers an internally healing message, the entire complexion of the film changes with a journey through the colorful village landscapes populated by ordinary civilians, where they find the Magician’s uncle, a strong and powerful man known as the Butcher (Ralph Prosper), who immediately welcomes them both.  One of the more impactful images of the film is a poster inside the Butcher’s home of Patrice Lumumba hanging on the wall, much like Americans have similar pictures of JFK or Martin Luther King – all dead luminaries.  It’s clear that everyone around them has lost family members and have been harshly affected by the war, still carrying deep-seeded wounds, but the young couple can finally relax enough to start developing feelings for one another, where Mwanza in particular brightens up when the Magician asks her to marry him.  Refusing to budge unless he finds her a white rooster, the mood develops a lighter tone where all the chicken coops are searched to no avail, yet the locals are familiar with the customary marriage ritual, continually teasing the Magician.  It’s here the lush and colorful vegetation, including the most gorgeous driveway ever seen, mixed with a killer musical soundtrack, with selections from the Soul of Angola Anthology 1965-1975, including the soulful ARTUR NUNES - tia - YouTube (3:45) and the hauntingly tranquil Tanga - Eme N'gongo Iami - YouTube (3:54) that simply intoxicate the viewer with the exotic locale of the Congo, where the warmth and local charm of the people rubs off on the young couple who finally get married, with the Magician finally displaying a little flair for magic.  Despite their happiness, she is still haunted by the ghosts of her parents who insist upon a proper burial in their hometown.  The blending of a documentary style realism with myth, superstition, local custom, and warmth all feed into this mesmerizing account of a surrounding nightmare of endless brutality, where the enveloping war just continually sucks innocent people into it.  One of the nicer aspects of the film is Komono’s running dialogue with her unborn child, who at times is her only friend in the world, where she’s forced to stand up for herself for the sake of her child, having to make impossible choices during wartime.  The film has one of the more original birth scenes ever recorded, lovingly etched into the viewer’s memory, where the two of them continue on in the mystifying journey to finally bury the past, much like something seen in a Weerasethakul film where characters are always haunted by ghosts of the past.  While her experience, though harrowing, is also a lyrical journey of survival, and probably not that different from many of the survivors the director interviewed who likely still suffer aftereffects of grief and remorse.  It’s important to note the battle has been raging for over 14 years in the Congo, much of it over control of precious resources, creating an entirely new society of traumatized victims, many of whom will likely never be able to bury the ghosts of the past.  This film is a fitting tribute and poetic requiem for the dead, especially the brilliantly chosen music that seems a fitting way to commune with the lingering spirits. 

Addendum

Well over a year after filming ended, a United Nations peace plan to stop the war was signed by 11 African countries in February 2013, called the Peace, Security and Cooperation Framework for the Democratic Republic of the Congo.  Known as the Second Congo War, one should note that peace accords were signed in 2003, yet the fighting continued for another decade.  Let’s hope the dramatic power and spiritual uplift from the film finally allows peace to prevail.  

Johnny Mad Dog

JOHNNY MAD DOG             B+                  

France  Liberia  Belgium  (93 mi)  2008  ‘Scope  d:  Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire

Southern trees bear strange fruit,

Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,

Black body swinging in the Southern breeze,

Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant South,

The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,

Scent of magnolia sweet and fresh,

Then the sudden smell of burning flesh!

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,

For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,

For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,

Here is a strange and bitter crop

—Billie Holiday-Strange fruit- HD - YouTube (3:03), 1939

In the opening ten minutes of this movie the audience witnesses child murders and a rape, where a family comes under the attack of young rebel forces, an armed band of roving children carrying heavy weaponry and shouting foul obscenities, searching for food, government soldiers, money, and other children to recruit, forcing the family to submit at gunpoint, which includes ordering a young pre-teen son to either shoot his father or be killed, a rite of passage many of them have experienced first hand.  Africa is a continent that knows continual strife from the everpresent eruptions of violent and bloody civil wars, where the worst African scenario involves the conscription of young children who are kidnapped by warlords or local militias and sent off to the front, usually hopped up on drugs carrying AK-47 assault rifles, oftentimes never seeing their families again as they have been killed and their villages burned during the many massacres.  One of the more controversial books written on the subject centers on the fighting in Sierre Leone, an autobiographical account written by a child soldier who was abducted at age 13 and is called A Long Way Gone:  Memoirs of a Boy Soldier, by Ishmael Beah, though many have questioned the historical accuracy of a child’s recollections.  This movie was shot in Liberia without ever identifying a country of origin, as the director instead relies on the viewer’s familiarity with a history of horrific African atrocities in Rwanda, Liberia, or the Sudan.

This film is a searingly raw and graphically realistic docudrama that follows one band of rebel soldiers under the command of 15-year old Johnny Mad Dog (Christophe Minie), who serves ‘Colonel Never Die’ (Joseph Duo), a mythical warlord who has recruited and trained them all, a fierce disciplinarian who instills uniformity through repeated profanity-laced mantras that are memorized and constantly shouted back in unison, especially during raids, a kind of military call back that mimics boot camp behavior.  But most peculiarly, the children wear whatever they have collected and picked up from their raids, which amazingly includes a pair of angel’s wings on one soldier, a red T-shirt claiming “It’s Better in the Bahamas,” a Crucifix, a white wedding dress, colorful wigs, a crash helmet, and what appear to be strands of Mardi Gras beads around the neck of Mad Dog.  This rag tag crew, many of whom are themselves former child soldiers from Liberia, look dressed for a photo shoot before a break dance contest instead of guerrilla warfare military attire.  To prepare them for battle, they are given an assortment of pep pills, most likely amphetamines and large doses of cocaine rubbed into their wounds to keep them wired, medicine that the children are led to believe will keep them invincible.  As they enter a nearby city, Mad Dog is ordered to take out and secure the state-controlled TV station, where the female news anchor is immediately terrorized and raped by two different rebel soldiers.         

There is a parallel storyline that includes Mad Dog’s chosen girlfriend that he calls Lovelita (Careen Moore), who he simply picks out of a group of fleeing civilian refugees, who is the closest thing to someone or something that he actually cares about, as otherwise these rebels show no regard whatsoever for human life and are in every sense of the word a terror organization, perhaps best expressed in a street scene with a young kid carrying oranges who they assume is an enemy soldier, and who they treat with full contempt.  As they move through the deserted streets openly chanting their victory songs, they are caught by sniper fire, a riveting scene reminiscent of Kubrick’s FULL METAL JACKET (1987), where they systematically track down the line of fire, firing off celebratory bullets into the air afterwards.  Simultaneously the camera follows the tragic storyline of 16 year-old Laokolé (Daisy Victoria Vandy), who tries to move her legless father and little brother away from the advancing rebel assault, who is continually seen walking through the perilously dangerous city streets, carrying her wounded father in a wheelbarrow to the United Nations hospital, eventually losing both, a prevailing theme in this adrenaline-laced portrait of a world gone mad, where there is no order but unending terror and chaos, where even if the rebels were to succeed, it’s inconceivable to even consider their capacity to lead, as they were designed to seek and destroy and have little use in the actual rebuilding of the country.  They are instead the haunting and tragic reminders of the ugly scars of war.    

Jackson Tennessee Fourgeaud's profoundly unsettling score casts a pall over the bloodbath of horrors, framing what we see in a new and different light, offering an anguishing perspective that respects both the living and the dead, where at one point a rebel soldier’s radio strapped to his back carries a Martin Luther King speech about the history and ramifications of slavery, making a strange historical connection to these young children of war who have been uprooted from their homes and severed from their families literally for centuries, always serving the agenda of larger unseen powers.  One of the more moving sequences is a seemingly spontaneous song that one soldier sings after the death of his fellow comrade.  The film is an unending stream of screams, chants, songs, taunts, and slogans, all signs of propaganda and uneducated youth, as they may not be able to read, but their choral chants can instill bone-chilling fear.  Surprisingly, the most profoundly moving segment is the end credit sequence, set to a quiet, searingly personal Nina Simone rendition of “Strange Fruit,” Strange Fruit Nina Simone Version - YouTube (3:28), an achingly graphic portrait of a Southern lynching made famous by Billie Holiday.  This connection to the roots of the slave trade is particularly effective, as are the chilling archival photos of child soldiers dressed up for war, proud to be seen photographed on a roadside lined with lingering images of atrocities and death.