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.
