Up Shit Creek

“It feels completely surreal!” laughs Kim Nguyen, the Québécois filmmaker who's just taken his Best Foreign Language-nominated film War Witch, and its 15-year-old Congolese leading-lady Rachel Mwanza, to the Academy Awards. “If I pitched this to a producer they'd tell me it sounds too far-fetched, like a cheap version of Argo: a girl from the streets of Kinshasa meets a Canadian film crew, they cast her in this film, she goes to Berlin and gets an award from the hands of Jake Gyllenhaal, yadda yadda yadda, and at the end she walks the red carpet at the Oscars. A producer would say: 'C'mon, man, are you stupid?' But that's what has happened to Rachel! It's pretty cool.”

Nguyen, 39, is in a cab in Montréal, fresh off a plane back from Los Angeles. Both places are a world away from the Congo, where his vérité tale of child soldiers and rag-tag rebel militias was shot. “Tired of making films” requiring vast investment, Nguyen conceived War Witch as a film that could be shot on-the-cheap. “The plan was just to go down there with a crew of like five people, do it guerrilla style, shoot as if we were hunting,” he offers. “But it didn't work out that way; it turned out to be another kind of guerrilla style. At one point, going from one location to another, we had to pass through a bad neighbourhood, and I looked behind me and there was about 34 vehicles, and in front of me there was an armed convoy, guiding us, and guarding us.”

Nguyen took inspiration from films “about going up the river: Fitzcarraldo, Apocalypse Now, Hearts Of Darkness”, and War Witch trails along the Congo River, inhabiting its locations completely; including a memorable scene in the ruined palace of Joseph Mobutu in Gbadolite. “It was abandoned, filled with creepers, just totally desolate and eerie and powerful; it was something you could have never imagined in a script, you had to be there to believe it,” Nguyen recalls.

Coming in as foreigners, the crew were met with initial – understandable – scepticism. “People there are really guarded about what your motivations are,” says Nguyen. “There have been so many films where a white person from North America – an aid worker or a journalist or a general – comes in and saves sub-Saharan Africa. I accepted the fact that people were going to be judgmental because of that.”

Instead, they were welcomed by locals, and the resulting picture is the opposite of the condescending 'white knight' movie; even its local crew saying they made an “African tale that the world hadn't seen before”. War Witch has, thus, thrown Nguyen to the frontlines of the “global dialogue” on Africa, and he's plenty forthcoming about it.

“Humanitarian organisations in Africa are corporations, and so they naturally function in a way that benefits the self-propagation of the corporation,” Nguyen says. “Finding money is easier for them in an emergency, so you realise that, subconsciously, those corporations almost want things to stay in the emergency mode, to not get better. Development is not marketable in a humanitarian way, so they're not interested in, for example, financing higher education, and developing an educated population who can undertake not just peace-solving issues, but the pragmatic rebuilding and restructuring of society on a literal level.”

In cinemas Thursday 14 March.