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WAR/DANCE
Directed by: Sean Fine & Andrea Nix Fine.
Produced by: Albie Hecht.
Director of Photography: Sean Fine.
Edited by: Jeff Consiglio.
Music by: Asche & Spencer.
Released by: ThinkFilm.
Language: English & Acholi with English subtitles.
USA. 105 min. Rated PG-13.

War/Dance opens with kids setting off on a field trip from school to a national music competition. But unlike other kids, their school bus is bristling with armed guards. Over two days, they need to travel safely from their crowded displaced persons camp in the far, isolated reaches of northern Uganda to the capital in Kampala, past the rebels of the Lord’s Resistance Army. And that’s the most uneventful part of their young lives and this emotional documentary.

Directors Sean Fine and his wife, Andrea Nix Fine, interweave two thematic stories. One is the portrait of the war zone, where two decades of fighting have killed thousands of Acholi tribe members and driven a million shell-shocked survivors into over-crowded, ill-equipped refugee camps, including thousands of children who are victims, witnesses, and, as if that wasn’t enough, brutally forced into the rebel army. These terrible experiences are related matter-of-factly by three youngsters speaking directly to the camera: Rose, 13, and 14-year-olds Dominic and Nancy.

Everything changes for these three and their fellow students when they sing and dance together. Under the tutelage of their dedicated teachers, and two professional musicians who risk their lives to come from Kampala to help them prepare more rigorously for the finals, they strive to meet high standards in the required categories of Western chorus, instrumental composition, and traditional dance, with barely adequate homemade instruments and costumes decorated from scrounged materials. (The soundtrack also includes beautiful songs and instrumentals by Ugandan musicians Samite and Geoffrey Oryema.) For all, art is their ultimate escape from stress and trauma.

The extreme setting and the horribly stolen childhoods starkly set this film apart from fiction films like Drumline or documentaries like Mad Hot Ballroom that involve viewers in music and dance competitions, but Sean Fine’s camera can be uncomfortably intrusive. An ethical issue rises over what is informed consent involving families, who have never seen a film, participating in the documentary, and the question if certain raw scenes were instigated or encouraged for the camera. These include day-in-the-life scenes of orphaned Rose’s aunt ordering her to do continual house work and Nancy’s mother taking her daughter to her father’s grave, with all its attendant physical and psychological risks. As steadfast as Nancy has been, she, quite understandably, completely loses it as awful memories come flooding back, and she’s hysterical in grief. Also feeling forced is an odd attempt at truth and reconciliation between Dominic and a captured rebel officer, who the youth hopes will recognize his missing brother in a photograph. He questions the soldier why the rebels abduct children, only to get a shrugged response that he was following orders.

With a visual emphasis on the beauty of the African landscape constantly contrasted with the first-hand accounts of the depths of man’s inhumanity to man, Fine’s camera work gets unnecessarily artsy during the children’s testimony of worse and worse abominations they have seen or even been forced to perpetrate. Their recounts of actions that most their age would only know from the most gruesome horror films are unnecessarily emphasized by rising music, dramatic weather shots, and slo-mo, shaky imagery.

But the looks on these talented and amazingly resilient children’s faces when they lose themselves in exuberant music and dance raises this film above any stunts of editing, as their nervous smiles ease into genuine joy. Stunning their more polished competitors, who looked down on them as poor pitiful victims of the war zone, they become “giants” – full-fledged artists, exemplars of their tribe’s ancient traditions. In addition to subtitles that are unusually legible, the credits include references to several organizations and Web sites that can provide further information on the conditions at the camps in Uganda. Nora Lee Mandel
November 9, 2007