One Less Murderer

Ezra’s approach to jungle warfare couldn’t be more different from John Rambo’s

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.

Ezra

Directed by Newton I Aduaka

Aduaka’s second feature is ostensibly about child soldiers in Africa. A series of flashbacks show the titular protagonist’s (Mamodou Turay Kamara) journey into and out of a corrupt rebel army. Kidnapped from school at age six, Ezra’s psyche is stripped bare over the next ten years, culminating in an amphetamine-fueled attack on his hometown. Fleeing the rebels with his determined sister (Mariame N’Diaye) and pregnant girlfriend (Mamusu Kallon), the film’s tensest scenes follow Ezra and his companions through hushed jungles. With the camera bound to this frail trio, every dark corner of the landscape hides potential violence and destruction.


A Truth and Reconciliation Committee, assembled for communal healing, initiates the flashbacks to these traumatic episodes. As Ezra admits his actions, at his sister’s insistence, the film addresses the process of rehabilitation for war-torn individuals and communities. For viewers in a nation at war whose re-integration programs are inadequate, Ezra’s treatment of soldiers’ psychology may emerge as the most poignant of its many strengths.

Opens February 13 at Film Forum
4 out of 5

A similar version of this review appears in the February 13 issue of The L Magazine, and can be read here.

New trial for an old case

Bamako – the opening film of the second annual Montreal Human Rights Film Festival – is fascinating and intriguing, but mostly for cinematic reasons that have little to do with human rights. Far more compelling than its political context and messages, the films manipulations of genre and systems of identification are complex and original.

Directed by Mauritanian Abderrahmane Sissako, the film is set in a communal courtyard in the Malian capital Bamako. Amidst the locals’ daily activities, the courtyard has become the setting for a trial: spokespersons for the African civil society are taking the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank to court. The trial dominates the films narrative, but we are also aware of other goings on in the courtyard from which subordinate plots slowly emerge. Nightclub singer Melé (Aïssa Maïga) and her stoic husband Chaka (Tiécoura Traoré), the closest this Bamako comes to having main characters, provide a family melodrama as the couple drift apart and the future of their daughter remains unclear. This plot, however, stays undeveloped and is constantly displaced by the global trial unfolding outside their door.

The trial in the courtyard is a clever device, allowing Sissako to juxtapose impoverished Malian village life with a discussion of the international power structures perpetuating African poverty. But for a film being shown at the Montreal Human Rights Film Festival, a biting critique and indictment of the IMF and World Bank is, let’s face it, preaching to the converted. Well-articulated as Bamako is – complete with quotations from the father of postcolonial theory Aimé Césaire – the arguments it puts forward are nothing new in the denunciation of the neo-colonial practices of global financial institutions. That said, this film is completely fascinating for the ways in which it plays with cinematic conventions.

Bamako combines several different film genres in very jarring ways. The films form, a collision of different genres, becomes an analogy for the way globalization forces disparate cultures into dialogue in more or less exploitative ways. This piecing together of genres also testifies to the influence of the films multiple nodes of production – France, Mali, and the United States. The majority of the film, therefore, is a courtroom drama that overlaps with a humanitarian documentary on community life. Our glimpses of the domestic troubles between Melé and Chaka also provide a hint of the family melodrama genre. The most jarring use of genre in Bamako, however, is the intrusion of a xenophobic Western.

About halfway through the film, a family takes its TV into the empty courtyard at night to watch a film entitled Death in Timbuktu. What follows is five minutes of a hilarious movie-within-the-movie that stars Danny Glover (Lethal Weapon, Beloved). Death in Timbuktu shows a group of cowboys roll into the Malian city and shoot up every local who crosses their path for no reason. When the solitary Danny Glover character kills one of the cowboys their outlaw antics degenerate into dark comedy, and the group resorts to shooting wildly in the deserted streets.

This sequence brings in the Western genre – often associated with something between colonization and genocide – and uses it for parody. First, when the Danny Glover character kills one of the outlaws, he becomes something of a good guy, protecting the people of Timbuktu. Glover is also, it turns out, the executive producer of Bamako, so this sequence is a parody of the idea that just by financing a Malian film Glover is somehow saving the whole country from the IMF and World Bank. Making a movie – or watching one for that matter – does little or nothing to curb humanitarian injustice. There is the added irony that the Malian family watching Death in Timbuktu don’t root for the Malians in the film, or Glover’s character, but the murderous rampaging cowboys. Bamako points out the assumptions of Western viewers that Malian movie-goers necessarily identify with Malian characters onscreen. The broader project of this Western sequence is to underline the fact that identification in film is not restricted by gender or race.

While the film concludes with moving speeches on the evils of global finance and the resilience of the African people, these moments are pre-digested. Bamako articulates those arguments in a very convincing way, but brings little new to the table in terms of its political message. Particularly in the context of the Montreal Human Rights Film Festival, Bamako is much more innovative in its treatment of film than its discussion of human rights.

Note: This article was published on 22 March 2007 in the McGill Daily and can be found on that paper's website here.