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War Dance
Documentary

Actor/Actress	Character
Rose
Dominic
Nancy
Directed by	Sean Fine, Andrea Nix Fine
Rated PG-13
105 minutes

Next time you’re tempted to grouse about the slow line at the supermarket, or the hamburger that arrives overdone, or why the hell your cable company can’t get The Tennis Channel, consider the plight of the Acholi. The Acholi are a tribe in northern Uganda, where civil war has raged for two decades between the government and the rebel Lord’s Resistance Army, decimating their population and devastating their homeland.

War Dance doesn’t tell us much about the issues at stake in this rebellion, but it does give us a grim report on the methods of the rebels. The Lord’s Resistance Army destroys villages, murders civilians, and abducts children to fill its ranks. Little boys are pressed into the rebel army, and sometimes forced to kill their families, friends, or neighbors to prove themselves. The girls are used for sex. Over two million Acholi, roughly 90 percent of the tribe, have been displaced.
The bulk of the documentary is set in the Patongo Displacement Camp in northern Uganda, home to over 60,000 refugees. For the first time ever, the Patongo school has been invited to go to the nation’s capital in Kampala for the National Music Competition. A cadre of professional music teachers is imported to drill the children of Patongo in the various categories of the competition and whip their performances into shape. I wasn’t clear who recruited the teachers. Perhaps it was the filmmakers themselves, Sean and Andrea Nix Fine, husband-and-wife documentarians. After all, they had a stake in how the competition would turn out, since their documentary follows the format of the underdog sports movie.

The Fines focus on three children in the camp. Rose sings with the chorale. Dominic is a wizard on the xylophone. Nancy is a traditional dancer. All three of these kids have been through things in their young lives that you wouldn’t even want your children to read about. “Since the day we were born, we have heard gunshots,” Dominic says. We hear their stories from the children themselves. Some of it is talking head testimony, the camera close on the sometimes tear-streaked young faces as they tell of abduction, fear, hiding in the bush, being forced to commit murder, seeing their parents dragged away and slaughtered. Sometimes we hear their voice-over accounts of their experiences, often against dramatic, fantastically beautiful shots of African skies and scenery. The juxtaposition is hauntingly effective, as if emphasizing the temporal quality of the horrors against the eternity of the natural splendor.

There are places where this documentary feels a little bit staged. You aren’t always sure what you’re hearing is an impromptu telling – it may be rehearsed testimony, although not necessarily less horrific and truthful for that. There is a scene in which Dominic gets permission to talk to a rebel officer who has been captured. He wants to see if he can get news of his brother, who was shanghaied into the rebel army. The exchange is so low key that one suspects this may not be the first time through for the two of them. “Why do the rebels abduct children like me?” the boy asks plaintively. The soldier replies gently, almost apologetically, that it swells the ranks of the army. “When you have more children you have more power.” There’s not much raw tension or drama in the confrontation. Another, more wrenching scene follows Nancy and her mother on a first visit to her father’s grave. Again, the presence of the camera raises a question of spontaneity, but there is no doubting the raw grief that overwhelms the girl.

Against this backdrop of war and horror, music is the great hope. The National Music Competition is the biggest thing in the lives of these young refugees. The odds against this little refugee camp school having made the nationals were long indeed – there are over 20,000 schools in Uganda vying for the honor. So they drill and they drill, they work and they work, and finally they are loaded into tucks and driven, protected by armed guards, through dangerous rebel country to Kampala for the finals. “”I’m excited to see what peace looks like,” one of the children says nervously.
The scenes of the competition are exciting and colorful, and surrounded with the kind of tension that such contests provoke in the movies when we have a rooting interest in one of the contestants. The high point is the dance competition, where our Patongo kids are doing their traditional Acholi dance called Bwola. “If I make a mistake in Bwola,” Nancy frets, “it will be an insult to my tribe.”

The camerawork gets a little too seduced into close-ups in some of this performance section; there were places where I was impatient to get a better sense of the overall dance patterns and less of the faces of individual dancers. But it is wonderful to watch this joyous slice of the cultural lives of these victimized, traumatized children struggling to survive and build a better life in a desperately troubled part of the world.
War Dance has been nominated for the Best Documentary Feature Oscar in this year’s Academy Awards. It won the directing prize for a documentary at Sundance in 2007, and has won audience awards at a number of festivals.