Ex Child-Soldiers From Liberia Act Out War Trauma in Movie

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CANNES, France (AFP) — Former child-soldiers from Liberia act out the horror of one of Africa's most murderous recent conflicts in a new film on children forced to go to war, showing this week at the Cannes film festival."Johnny Mad Dog" by French film-maker Jean-Stephane Sauvaire is based on a novel by Congolese writer Emmanuel Dongala, also from a part of Africa where children are given guns.
The film was selected by festival organisers to screen at its parallel Un Certain Regard section grouping movies that are more original or less mainstream than those competing for its top film prize.
"Violence in childhood is a subject that fascinates me," Sauvaire told AFP in an interview. "There is always violence during childhood but it can degenerate and become atrocity."
The 39-year-old film-maker, who in 2003 shot a documentary in Colombia involving teen violence in "Carlitos Medellin", this time chose fiction to shoot the parallel stories of 15-year-old rebel chief Johnny Mad Dog and 13-year-old Laokole, forced to flee the brutality of war.
While the country is not specified in the film, Sauvaire in fact travelled to Liberia where he first chose 15 children, all veterans of war, from 500 to 600 he met.
He then moved into a house in the Liberian capital Monrovia for a year with the children to gain their trust, explain the film, and help the then illiterate group to learn to act.
"I wanted the film to be as realistic as possible, so I needed to make it with children who had fought in battle, and in a country that had known war," he said.
"I didn't want to cheat with a subject that is too painful and violent to be caricatured," he added.
The children, he added, said films such as Hollywood's "Blood Diamond" had failed to encapsulate their war."In the first sequence, an attack in a village, I began to set up the scene but straight away they said 'No let us get set up, we know what to do'".
Sauvaire said he was wary of traumatising the children by re-opening old sores but that theatre was one of the methods used by specialist aid groups to help evacuate bad memories.
"The children changed during the year we spent together," he said. "It appeased them, they were more stable."
"It really became their film. I called them from Cannes and they said 'How's it going with our film?'"
Sauvaire has set up a foundation to continue to help the children -- www.jmdfoundation.org.
Last year, a movie by Nigerian director Newton Aduaka on blood diamonds and child soldiers, "Ezra", won the Golden Stallion at Africa's biggest filmfest in Burkina Faso.