Film Carew

An Oscar-nominated Canadian film depicting child soldiers in Congo doesn't sound like a great proposition; tapping, as it does, into the reflexive recoil that comes from a long, troubled history of White Knight movies, where the virtuous, Caucasian, usually-American do-gooder arrives on foreign shores, is outraged by what they see, and then single-handedly staves off AIDS or deposes a dictator or shuts down the Blood Diamond trade or etc. Yet, War Witch (or, by the original title it's known as elsewhere, Rebelle) seeks not only to avoid those clichés, but to rail against them. Filmmaker Kim Nguyen doesn't stick an international production upon local landscapes, but inhabits them; he doesn't impose a worldly worldview on proceedings, but respects the folklore and superstition endemic to the conflict; and he doesn't tell the tale through the eyes of an interloping Hollywood star, but through a 15-year-old Kinshasa street-kid, Rachel Mwanza.

Befitting a film following guerrilla soldiers, War Witch was made guerrilla-style, on-the-ground in the Congo; from jungle greens and dappled light splattering through the canopies, through eerie scenes amongst the ruins of the long-abandoned, lost-city palaces of Joseph Mobutu in Gbadolite, unto the endless greys and blacks of the rocks on the banks of the Congo (carrying the symbolic weight of coltan, the element-rich rocks funding the civil war). The river itself is a big, big symbol, the eternal image of the passage-of-life, and so much of the narrative finds Mwanza's character going up and down river, into the unknown future, or back into the narrative past. It is the river that the whole country is built around, the whole conflict is based around; and it's always there, snaking through the narrative; as much a part of the story as the endless flashes of automatic-weaponfire.

War Witch immediately drops its audiences into the horror of the conflict - now officially the bloodiest since World War II - with an immediate dramatic crisis: armed rebels race up the river in motorboats, alight in Mwanza's shanty-town, and round up the children to rear into fighters. She's presented, immediately, with a harrowing choice that is, really, no choice: either she shoots her parents herself, or watches them get cut up by a machete. It's a brutal beginning, but hardly salacious; later, a character named The Butcher refrains from detailing the horrors he has witnessed - seen enacted on his family - because they're too horrific to speak of. Nguyen doesn't dodge the astonishing cruelty of the conflict, but he periodically peels away from it, finds moments of humour and humanity as safe narrative refuges. A fleeting romance between his lead and another superstitiously-blessed child-soldier presents the opportunity for Malickian scenes of two lovers retreated into a sweetly-lit landscape, with the hallucinogenic sap they're drinking making a legit cinematic cue for soft-edged, slurringly-lensed dreaminess. It's ultimately ephemeral, of course; happiness finding little time to shine amidst escalating conflict.

War Witch isn't a portrait of child soldiers in that Message Movie sense, but a look at a generation who've been raised knowing only war; for whom the brutalities of its carnage are the bedrocks of their psyche. Indoctrination into the ranks of these soldiers, these Great Tigers, comes with fighters being conditioned to view their guns as their “father and mother”, and this becomes a recurring dramatic symbol of the social schism between those on the frontlines and those attempting to live on in spite of the war; Mwanza unable - to the point of being hysterical - to give up her gun, even when seeking help, a roof over her head, or medical attention. Our heroine, this witch, is blessed/cursed with the ability to see the dead; which, amidst the Congolese killing-fields, means seeing the endless pain and suffering, the teeming numbers of millions slain. The film finishes with our lead desperately trying to bury the remains of her parents before the birth of her own child; twin ends of closure/future that scatter the tiniest seeds of hope across soil soaked in blood.

The title of Sergei Loznitsa's In The Fog refers at once to the fog of war and the fog of the forests; his highly-symbolist, often-minimalist, half-dreamlike war-movie spending so much time - of its long, long two-hour run-time - in the woods that they start to take on a mythical presence. Which means, for most cinephiles, the fog will linger as the spectre of Tarkovsky, even if it's the inscrutable, politically-poignant films of the founding father of Ukrainian cinema, Alexander Dovzhenko, that seem more likely to be Loznitsa's inspiration. Belarusian-born and Ukrainian-bred, Loznitsa has grown up on lands that were, in World War II, the frontlines of the struggle, and In The Fog is an examination - in haunted, weighty, heavy scenes lingering with eerie silence - of the conflicted morals of life under occupation; not so much interested in interloping Nazis or righteous resisters, but the turncoats who flipped from positions of power under Soviet rule to positions of power under the Reich, or the locals forced to navigate a new climate in which they must heed to imposed rule, yet still be seen as non-colluders by their fellow villagers.

That's largely told through the form of Vladimir Svirskiy, who plays a railway worker suspected of selling-out to the Germans after he's spared public hanging in the film's arresting, ultra-long-take opening. This becomes a black mark upon him; even though his supposed collusion with the Nazis is left open-ended, and, perhaps even, never happened. But the mere intimation of 'selling out' becomes its own self-fulfilling myth; gossip taken as gospel in a local climate riddled with suspicion. Local partisans quickly haul Svirskiy off to be executed, only for him to escape into the woods; wherein he weighs up his soul, and that of his countrymen. “People are unstable by nature, especially if they want to survive,” he's told, at one moment, theme condensed into a single utterance. Ideals and morals are noble, yet, during wartime, they seem always able to be bent or compromised; either by individuals or whole societies.

The Skylab is the film Julie Delpy made between 2 Days In Paris and 2 Days In New York, and, where those pictures are studies in comic cross-cultural clashes, here, her pic is particularly French. In it, a large ensemble of famous French actors gathers for an extended-family turn that turns boozy, bawdy, and bellicose. The family effectively serves as microcosm for the country: spanning all ages, social classes, intellectual ranges, and political beliefs; their bickerings a comic, cacophonous take on the national discourse circa 1979. There's enough saucy scenes of ribald jokes and/or people yelling at each other to keep most viewers entertained, but only those who come from sprawling families of cranky caricatures will take much from it.