Sunday, March 18, 2007
A Nigerian film for the first time in the history of Africa's biggest biennial film festival, FESPACO, at the weekend clinched the Golden Stallion. The film Ezra was directed by the London-based Newton Aduaka and it is about blood diamonds and child soldiers.
Ezra, which derives its name from the main character, was premiered at the US Sundance festival held last month. At the last week's Pan African Film and Television Festival of Ouagadougou, it elicited the emotional appreciation of the audience.
The film opens on Ezra, who is struggling to return to normality after the ferocious civil war that ravaged Sierra Leone. The 16-year-old was abducted from his classroom by Sierra Leonean rebels at the age of seven and trained to fight as a child soldier.
His days are divided between coming to terms with the past at a psychological rehab centre and taking the stand before a UN-sponsored national truth and reconciliation commission. Ezra seems – conveniently? – to suffer from amnesia. He does not recall being part of the battalion of teenage rebel soldiers who torched his home village and mowed down his parents, as his sister revealed before the commission. Rag-tag rebels had her tongue sliced off during the war.
The rebel commander had on that fateful day had his troops injected one by one with amphetamines and ordered them to go "cut off the hands" of the villagers. This was to prevent their voting for a rival political camp. He had just concluded a blood diamonds deal with white arms traffickers.
"My film is about war, who fights it, how they fight it," Aduaka recently told a reporter. For the 41-year-old, the memories of the Biafran war are still fresh. It was "a war where starvation was used as a weapon of war for the first time and more than a million people died.”
His interest in the Sierra-Leone, where he had travelled to conduct his research, stems from his obsession with the “effects of war”.
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