Of all the obscenities that war creates, the phenomenon of the ‘child soldier’ must be one of the worst.
It’s a tactic as old as warfare itself – to take a boy or girl from their family and teach them to kill before they have any sense of right and wrong, or even of their own mortality – but the recent spate of civil wars and rebellions in sub-Saharan Africa have seen it spread and used as a deliberate tool to spread terror and intimidation.
It’s inspired some fine photojournalism and documentary work, and occasionally been seen in mainstream movies such as Blood Diamond, but always as another terror of the Dark Continent for our (usually Western) heroes to deal with. Here the children themselves take centre stage; the result is one of the most gripping, harrowing and moving films I’ve seen for years.
It starts as it means to go on – with a brutally intense series of staccato, hand-held scenes where the only dialogue is a succession of screamed, barely coherent threats and questions. This is the child soldiers at work – descending on a village to loot and terrorise under the pretence of finding information, smoking out Government sympathisers or members of the scapegoated Dogo tribe, and mustering new recruits. Any answer which fails to satisfy (or just vaguely annoys) results in instant execution, culminating in a scene where the one boy who hasn’t managed to hide from them is initiated by being forced to shoot his father or be killed himself.
Be in no doubt, this is a tough watch. The violence is graphic, random and real, and the film operates on a level of constant intensity which mirrors the boys’ permanently hyped-up fighting madness. They speak in a rapid-fire, expletive-laden patois of English, French and tribal dialect; even with subtitles it’s hard to know what they’re talking about sometimes, because, of course, they don’t know themselves. The audience feels as terrified and threatened as the innocent civilians unlucky enough to cross their path - suddenly confronted by a boy with a gun, given liberty to indulge all his capacity for bullying and cruelty with no one to stop him.
