With Ezra (at Film Forum until February 26), Nigerian director Newton I. Aduaka has crafted a taut film detailing the psychological warfare used to control child soldiers who fill the ranks of rebel armies in Africa. More than witness these atrocities though, Aduaka’s nerve-wracking and emotionally devastating narrative gives viewers a diluted dose of the trauma inflicted upon these abducted children. This is cinema as psychological warfare, and every moment of calm bears the weight of its imminent destruction.
A sense of inevitable disaster – that evil lurks at the edge of every frame – is established in Ezra’s first scene and remains throughout. As class begins at a village school, six year-old Ezra arrives late. Just in time, however, to be kidnapped by the Brotherhood rebels. His sister Onitcha (Mariame N’Diaye) is among the few who escape, and as Aduaka’s film gains momentum she plays as crucial a role as her brother. She joins Ezra (Mamodou Turay Kamara) and his pregnant girlfriend Mariam (Mamusu Kallon), and the trio ditches the Brotherhood to flea through the jungle. The ensuing journey provides the film’s most suspenseful moments, as every shadow or ridge might hide a rival rebel group – or worse yet, the army. With our vision limited to the protagonists’ point of view, tension mounts with every passing moment of silence. When bad things happen – and they do, repeatedly – we are as shocked and unprepared as the characters we’re following.
These devastating events all unfold as flashbacks, as they are being retold to a Truth and Reconciliation Committee. This courtroom-style meeting is a kind of village therapy; an attempt at communal healing hoping to rehabilitate Ezra and help those he has harmed come to terms. These parallel plots of guerilla warfare and courtroom drama recall another promising episode in recent African cinema, Abderrahmane Sissako’s 2006 Bamako. That film showed the hardships of life among the denizens of the Malian capital, alongside a mock trial in which the African Civil Society attacked the neocolonial practices of the IMF and World Bank. Both films dramatize contemporary Africa’s ruin alongside an effort to address the continent’s innumerable disadvantages in an improvised courtroom. Where conventional law continues to fail, perhaps cinema will succeed, at least that’s the premise being explored by this pair of talented filmmakers.Ezra promises good things ahead for cinephiles concerned over the fate of African cinema, especially given the recent passing of its pioneer Ousmane Sembene. Aduaka’s film recalls much of the late director’s work, marrying small-scale devastation with acute knowledge of the global forces perpetuating Africa’s disadvantages. Aduaka uses this simultaneous understanding of the macro- and micro-politics of his continent to devastating effect. For both Aduaka and Sissako – like Sembene before them – film offers the most compelling avenue towards justice for a people who’ve been most wronged by those claiming to help them.
A similar version of this review appears in the February 13 issue of the New York Press, and can be read here.
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