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.  

Grigris

GRIGRIS                     B                     

Chad  France  (101 mi)  2013  ‘Scope  d:  Mahamat-Saleh Haroun      Website     Trailer

Mahamat-Saleh Haroun was born in Chad but fled the country in the 80’s due to the civil war conflict and relocated in France, where he worked as a journalist before studying at the Conservatoire Libre du Cinéma in Paris.  Following in the tradition of African filmmakers from Senegalese Ousmane Sembène to Mauritanian Abderrahmane Sissako, Haroun uses deceptively quiet surfaces, where his films obscure the underlying tensions of the region, perhaps most beautifully expressed in his acclaimed War Trilogy.  Returning to Chad to make films, the locations could be anywhere in Africa, as they always reflect a postcolonial African society, where in dealing with poverty or family loss, people are often uprooted and transplanted away from their homelands, struggling to find their place in the modern world.  Haroun contrasts the moral compromises that result from the challenges of living in the fast-paced urban life against the distant rural communities that continue to maintain a link to the traditional past.  After concluding his War Trilogy with 2010 Top Ten Films of the Year: #2 A Screaming Man (Un homme qui crie), winner of the Jury prize at Cannes, Haroun has chosen an odd, almost eccentric character in Grigris (Souleymane Démé), where in the riveting opening sequence, we hear a cramped nightclub audience come to life with applause as they chant his name:  “Grigris! Grigris!”  The man does not disappoint once he hits the dance floor, though he has a noticeably imbalanced walk due to a nearly useless crippled left leg.  His flexibility, however, is abnormal, as is his upper body strength, which allows him to do high-powered gymnastic moves where his body bends and moves in ways that it shouldn’t, but his choreographed performance is highly entertaining, enabling him to earn a few dollars on the side.  

Grigris works as an assistant in a storefront photography studio owned by his uncle (Marius Yelolo), often chided by his wife for smoking too much, where there’s a wry humor to their family relationship.  When the stunningly beautiful Mimi (Anaïs Monory) steps into the studio looking for fashion model photos, it’s amusing how the eyes of each man on the street follows her every move, but none more than Grigris, who thinks she’s the most beautiful women he’s ever seen in his life.  Accordingly, he treats her with kindness, and catches her eye dancing in the nightclub she frequents, as little does he know she works as a bar hostess.  Though she appears way out of his league, she takes to him and they become friends, as he views her differently than all the others who see her only as a commodity.  We watch him rehearse his act on an abandoned stage, where he has dance aspirations, hoping one day it might take him somewhere.  But his dreams are short-lived when his uncle ends up in the hospital with a whopping medical bill.  Desperate to earn fast money, he turns to the local crime boss for a job, Moussa (Cyril Gueï), a gun-toting gangster that travels with hired thugs, but also a guy that smuggles black market gasoline over the border to Cameroon, which involves swimming across the river carrying the gasoline behind in large plastic containers that are tied together.  Grigris nearly drowns in his first attempt, drawing the ire of his boss, who needs guys he can depend on, contemptuously throwing Grigris back out onto the street.  But he begs for another chance, claiming he can drive a truck, and is surprisingly successful in outmaneuvering the chasing police. 

When Grigris double-crosses his boss, selling the gasoline to others, then purposefully injuring himself in an attempt to explain he was robbed and beaten up by the cops, Moussa and his troops are furious, but he secretly brings all the cash to his uncle in the hospital.  But guys like Moussa aren’t ones to just let things go, reminiscent of the brutally violent, paramilitary militia of Papa Doc’s Tonton Macoute in Haiti, marauding gangs with guns that carry out indiscriminate threats and murders in a vicious reign of terror.  After an amusing Muslim ritual in front of Moussa with this thugs all dressed in white robes while wearing dark glasses, Grigris vows, with his hand on the Holy Quran, that he’s telling the truth, but they beat him up afterwards anyway, contending he’s lying, giving him two days to return the money or he’ll be shot.  Bleeding profusely, he has only Mimi to turn to, where the two of them go on the run into the outlands to her family’s village in the bush, where they’re greeted with open arms and immediately accepted into the community.  In an interesting twist, all the men are away in the fields harvesting crops, so what we see reflects a simplistic rural lifestyle of people living in huts, but also a collective mindset of the women, all dressed in vibrant colors, reflecting a unified spirit.  With music by Wasis Diop, brother of the director Djibril Diop Mambety, there is a gentle underlying tone of melancholic tenderness, a softer side that contrasts with the brutally cruel world of the urban male gangsters they’re running from.  What governmental structure exists remains unseen and is largely an invisible presence in ordinary people’s lives, while Moussa’s anarchistic gang of thugs are the everyday reality ruling the streets, threatening the safety of everyone.  What’s perhaps most devastating in the film is the continuing presence of poverty and the horrendous effect this plays in the decisions made by the characters, who are driven to perform loathsome acts by the surrounding forces of power and corruption.  While flowing with poetic naturalism, the film doesn’t have the bracing intensity of his earlier films, but continues to express the splintered disarray left in the wake of postcolonial Africa.       

Daratt (Dry Season)

DARATT (Dry Season)            A-   
Chad  France  Belgium  Austria  (96 mi)  2006  d:  Mahamat-Saleh Haroun

A brilliant film about the aftereffects of war and how amnesty and/or reconciliation never really brings about a peace, as the profound losses leave the nation and its citizens depleted of its most natural resource, human kindness and love, which all but disappears off the face of the earth.  Interestingly, another African film resembles this story nearly exactly, MUNYURANGABO (2007), released a year afterwards and set in Rwanda, shot by the American son of Korean immigrants doing missionary work in Rwanda.  Both are extremely simplistic, but for raw storytelling that gets to the root of anguish and loss, this film is nearly flawless.  Set in Chad, a former French colony in West Africa, the messenger in this film is Atim (Ali Bacha Barkai), aka the Orphan, a 20-year old kid whose father was killed during the nation’s civil war.  His nickname says it all, suggesting what his childhood must have been like in a tribal society where family connections mean everything, though no other reference to his childhood difficulties are shown in this film.  His face, however, reveals an intent seriousness that rarely, if ever, backs down from anyone.  When he and his blind grandfather listen to a radio broadcast announcing the results of the nation’s truth commission investigations, they find the resulting amnesty for everyone insulting, as murderers are free to roam the streets, including the killer of Atim’s father.  When his grandfather hands him his father’s revolver, sending Atim out to execute his father’s killer, there is no other possible solution in this family’s eyes.  Justice must come from their own hand.   

Using a stationary camera throughout, each shot by Abraham Haile Biru is beautifully composed without an ounce of artifice showing the natural colors of the region, the dry arid deserts and the poor dusty villages with mud and clay homes on dirt streets and no trees for miles as far as anyone can see across an empty horizon.  Out into this wilderness Atim is sent, as if fulfilling a Biblical obligation to carry out his mission, which leads him into the capital city of N’Djamena where he is promptly beat up by a few sadistic soldiers, signs of the continuing resentment and rage leftover long after the so-called peace agreement.  He soon discovers the home of Nassara (Youssouf Djaoro), a devout Muslim man who speaks with a voice box, a battle scar left over after someone nearly slit his throat.  He’s married to a young bride (Aziza Hisseine) who is closer in age to Atim, the result of an arranged wedding.  What follows is Atim sullenly and wordlessly helping Nassara who assumes a fatherly role with his sweaty and back-breaking routine of baking loaves of bread, where Atim withholds all thoughts and emotions and takes on the role of an angry, aimless youth far away from home.  Nassara personally acknowledges “I’ve done a lot of harm,” and keeps a small closet filled with a hoard of guns and ammunition.  Haroun advances the story through a series of flawless edits that reveal the passing of time in close proximity to one another, where it’s never clear Atim’s real aims, where under the surface is a seething, pent up rage for which there is no relief.  Atim oftentimes contemplates shooting his victim, but each time he gets his nerve up his target is not readily accessible, so against his will he ends up containing his anger.      

A companion piece to the divided lives of Abderrahmane Sissako’s BAMAKO (2006), who is himself a producer on this film, another portrait of the aftereffects of an African truth and justice commission, one also finds a similar theme in the Dardenne brother’s film THE SON (2002), which reverses the role of the child and the adult, as in that film, it is a father’s son that is killed by another kid about his son’s age that he suddenly comes in close contact with at a rehab woodworking workshop for juvenile offenders.  The difference here is the maturity level of the father whose loss is balanced against this adolescent journey to adulthood by a young Atim, continually set against a backdrop of lingering signs of war as evidenced through wordless images of offending police officers, a brutal wife-beating husband, and the seething hostility that continues to exist underneath the surface between father-figure Nassara and Atim.  Written by the director, featuring original music by Wasis Diop, the brother of Senegalese filmmaker Djibril Diop Mambéty, all of this is expressed visually through a continuing series of intelligent, near wordless sequences, where we all but lose track of time, but feel the subtle rumblings of something developing, even if it is just brief instances of kindness or human assistance, as it goes against the better judgment of each character, whose life history has been filled with absorbing continuing rounds of neverending punishment.  The camera lingers on what’s unsaid, on the spacious emptiness that surrounds so many moments of this film.  If the war is over, these men show few signs of it, as they couldn’t be more tense and tightly wound, finding it hard to hold it all in.  The finale is a poetic suggestion that people hold the answer to their own destiny, that the mind can find solutions, even if it doesn’t conform to their family or even their government’s wishes, as there is little doubt but that justice was obtained.

2010 Top Ten Films of the Year: #2 A Screaming Man (Un homme qui crie)

A SCREAMING MAN  (Un homme qui crie)              A                                                 

Chad  France  Belgium  (91 mi)  2010  ‘Scope  d:  Mahamat-Saleh Haroun

Beware of assuming the sterile attitude of a spectator,

for life is not a spectacle,

a sea of miseries is not a proscenium,

a screaming man is not a dancing bear….

—Aimé Césaire from Return to My Native Land, 1939

All of Haroun’s films touch on father and son relationships and the traumatic repercussions of war, his last three forming what amounts to a War Trilogy, showing children who are abandoned by their fathers in ABOUNA (2002) to a child seeking his dead father’s revenge in Daratt (Dry Season) (2006), which features an adult father figure (his father’s alleged killer) who is a shell of his former self, haunted and scarred by his role in war and by what he’s been forced to witness.  Africa is a continent that knows continual strife from the everpresent eruptions of violent and bloody civil wars, where Chad itself has had 4 different Civil Wars in the past 40 years and is linked to the ongoing conflict in Darfur, where the worst African scenario usually 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, whose villages may have been burned during the many massacres.  One of the more controversial books written on the subject centers on the fighting in Sierre Leone, 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 his recollections.  Haroun, on the other hand, never provides the specifics of these bloody events, relying on the viewer’s familiarity with African atrocities, but instead is more interested in the psychological ramifications of the survivors.  Both A SCREAMING MAN and Daratt (Dry Season) were shot in Chad during times of actual warfare, where the actual conditions bring a sense of authenticity to the shooting. 

From the cheerful opening scene in a hotel swimming pool, the brightness of the clear blue pool water contrasts heavily against the final somber images of the film, where a peaceful river flows into the dark of night.  Youssouf Djaoro as Adam is the centerpiece of the film, a quiet, mild-mannered father whose relaxed face describes his even temperament.  He’s a former Central Africa swimming champion, known around the grounds as “Champ,” who works at the pool with his son Abdel (Diouc Koma), teaching kids how to swim or leading pool exercises, while also keeping the grounds clean.  In his eyes, after twenty years the pool is his life, but due to privatization, a Chinese takeover of the hotel leads to cuts, where Adam at age 55 is considered too old and loses his pool job to his son, and is instead transferred to the humiliating position of gatekeeper, manually raising and lowering a wooden gate leading to the hotel entrance, forced to wear an ill fitting suit and endure the aggressive honks of hurried drivers all day.  But he’s also internally resentful that his son has taken over his prized position, showing not even the slightest remorse for this travesty. 

Listening to the radio is another common Haroun theme, where a grandfather and his grandson listen to the Truth Committee Investigation hearings in Daratt (Dry Season), where war murderers were offered amnesty, and here Adam listens to the daily reports of rebel forces attacking cities across the country but being repelled by the Army, where TV reports show shots of rebel children killed laying dead in the streets.  Local authorities demand money from families for the “war effort,” but as few have any money to offer, the Army takes their able bodied sons instead.  Adam doesn’t raise a hand in protest when they basically kidnap his son and send him off to the front.  Despite reclaiming his former position at the pool, he is wracked with guilt, but rather than cry out and scream, he suffers in silence while devastated by the news reports of escalating violence, while the continual sounds of helicopters flying overhead drown out the natural street sounds.  When Abdel’s pregnant girlfriend shows up, Djénéba Koné, who comes from a family of artists, she stays in Abdel’s room and can occasionally be heard singing softly. 

The entire tone of the film shifts from daylight to darkness, as the bright African colors so pronounced in the sunlight are drowned out by the darkness, turning this into a mournfully sad film, where in a haunting image Adam drives his motorcycle down a narrow alley engulfed in darkness, as his headlights become smaller and smaller before disappearing in the total blackness of the night.  Djénéba receives an audio tape from Abdel that describes a living hell around him where friends are quickly dying around him, where reports of rebels advancing is followed by a swarm of people exiting the city in a mass exodus, where chaos reigns even as the police are making unheeded loudspeaker announcements that everything is under control.  In what is perhaps Haroun’s final offering in his War Trilogy, the overriding theme is that “”war is perpetuated by man…war is a history, knowledge and experience that is handed down from father to son.”  Adam’s emotional devastation leads him to question the presence of God, where his scream is not so much against the war and its ravaging effects but against the silence of God.  The film is poetic and restrained, highly personal, quiet, transcendent, and beautifully understated, gorgeously shot almost entirely outdoors on location in ‘Scope by Laurent Brunet (who also shot two recent Christophe Honoré films), and has a transfixing finale, an offering of quiet peace against an unending assault of perpetual violence.