"The Silent Army" director says his portrayal of the plight of kids abducted by rebels only hints at the horror
LONDON (AlertNet) - The experiences of many of Africa's child soldiers are so brutal they couldn't possibly be portrayed on screen, says the director of "The Silent Army", a film about the plight of children forced to join rebel ranks.
The movie, shown at the Cannes Film Festival last year, was largely based on the suffering of northern Ugandan children at the hands of the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA).
Led by self-proclaimed mystic Joseph Kony, LRA members spread fear among their own communities by snatching children from their families, forcing boys to fight and using girls as “wives” - until they were driven out of Uganda in 2005.
"There are much more harrowing, horrific things that I could never show in a movie because it's too ugly," Dutch director Jean van de Velde told AlertNet in an interview.
The plot centres around Eduard Zuiderwijk, a white restaurant owner in an east African country, which is never identified, who is struggling to raise his son following the sudden death of his wife.
Eduard's young son, Thomas, is good friends with Abu, whose mother works in the restaurant. One night, Abu's village is attacked, houses are burned and he disappears along with many other children.
Thomas persuades Eduard, who feels he is failing as a father, to track Abu down and the story shifts to the boy's induction in a rebel camp, led by a former defence minister who insists his recruits call him "Daddy".
SOMETHING TO LOOK FORWARD TO
Van de Velde's research took him to camps in the northern Ugandan towns of Gulu and Kitgum, where he spoke to children who had managed to escape captivity.
"A couple of things were astonishing to me. One of things was they hardly ever talked, and they were not doing drugs at all. It was sheer psychological terror (that was used to control them)," van de Velde said.
"Once they were abducted, most of them had to kill either the mother or the father ... while the elders of the village were watching. These children were hardly able to come back. There's no reason to escape. What do they have to come back to, if the people of the village saw these atrocities?"
He said many children showed signs of trauma: "Even after they escaped they were afraid that all their thoughts were heard and seen by Kony.”
Van de Velde said he became interested in how the children came to terms with what had happened to them and what they were forced to do. He recalled meeting a teenager who had been held by the LRA for five or six years before escaping. He returned home, acquired a beehive and started selling honey.
"He said to me, 'As long as I have something to look forward to, I don't have to look backwards.’ I found that in all its simplicity very, very moving.”
AUDIENCE IS THE SILENT ARMY
Born in Bukavu, eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, van de Velde spent his childhood in former Zaire, Burundi and Uganda. One early memory is meeting the king of Burundi, Mwami Mwambutsa IV, in the swish Paguidas restaurant in the capital Bujumbura where the monarch would dine with his Swiss secretary.
"I have a close connection in my heart with Africa, especially with central and east Africa," he said.
But it wasn't until Marco Borsato, lead actor in "The Silent Army", suggested making a movie about child soldiers that van de Velde considered the theme. Borsato, a popular singer in the Netherlands, had for several years been an ambassador for War Child Holland.
"We sat together and I said there are a lot of documentaries on Africa but I would like to make a movie,” van de Velde said. “You cannot enter easily into the camps of child soldiers but with fiction you can, and you can, which I thought was very important, have a Western audience identify with a little black boy because that's the power of the narrative.”
The film was shot in Uganda and South Africa, and the director was determined that the actors spoke Swahili and Luganda.
"I really wanted the languages to be the languages spoken in Uganda,” he said. “Swahili for the military, Luganda for the ordinary people. I didn't want to make a Disney Africa movie. I wanted to make it as real as I could imagine."
That includes the violence. However, van de Velde said he was at pains to ensure the film was made "with the violence not being very exploitative or explicit".
"The psychology of what's happening, the suggestion is, of course, horrific and I cannot embellish because it is horrific. Ten seconds of Tarantino is far more aggressive in its execution than this movie because it's all suggestion," he added.
Speaking of the title of the film, van de Velde said “silent army” did not refer to the child soldiers but rather the audience.
"They are silent but if they speak they have a certain power. If they share the knowledge they have and make people aware of what's going on, maybe, maybe something can change."
Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.
