French filmmaker Jean-Stephane Sauvaire brought the horror of Liberia’s civil war to UN headquarters this week with the screening of “Johnny Mad Dog, his brutal portrayal of child soldiering.
Sauvaire’s film, which won the Prize of Hope at this year’s Cannes film festival, is based on a novel by Congolese writer Emmanuel Dongala about two teens trying to survive civil war in an unnamed African country.
In an interview with AFP, Sauvaire conceded that his film was violent, but said that the gun-toting youngsters in the film, all war veterans, were not traumatized by the experience and rather found acting therapeutic.
He said he wanted audiences to understand what it was like to be a child soldier and to be shocked and moved by the stories in the film.
“How can you do a movie about the war if it’s not violent? he asked.
Tuesday night’s screening was sponsored by the office of Radhika Coomaraswamy, the special representative of the UN Secretary General for Children and Armed Conflict, Special Court for Sierra Leone prosecutor Steven Rapp and France’s UN Ambassador Jean-Maurice Ripert.
Emmanuel Jal, a former child soldier turned musician from Sudan, also attended.
The screening was followed by a panel discussion at which Liberia’s UN Ambassador Milton Nathaniel Barnes urged the world to do more to control the proliferation of small arms which often end up in the hands of child soldiers.
“Those AK47s that you saw are plentiful, he said. “They are cheap and they are effective killing machines. I am personally of the belief that the real weapons of mass destruction are small weapons.
His counterpart from Sierra Leone, Allieu Kanu, commended the UN for its efforts to tackle the root causes of conflicts, but said countries like his and Liberia needed help in reintegrating former child soldiers.
“I believe the international community is not doing enough, he said. “These children who were recruited in my country, they’re now roaming the streets of Freetown (Liberia’s capital).
“They’re traumatized but we don’t have the means to counsel these children, to ensure these children are engaged in productive activities, Kanu added.
Sauvaire meanwhile explained that his biggest headache had been figuring out how to make a realistic war movie, complete with gun-wielding teenagers, while a United Nations arms embargo was in place.
The French director and the movie’s producers asked the UN Security Council to lift the embargo for demilitarized arms so they could import weapons that had been adapted to shoot blank ammunition, but they were told they had to make do with replicas.
“Thanks to special effects, the toy weapons look like the real thing in ‘Johnny Mad Dog’ and this same quest for authenticity was what drove the movie itself, the 39-year-old French director said.
While the country is not specified in the film, Sauvaire in fact traveled to Liberia where he first chose 15 children, all veterans of war, from 500 to 600 he met.
He decided to shoot the movie there after visiting the west-African country in 2004, a year after the end of its 14-year conflict in which 250,000 people were killed.
During the filming, which took place in 2006 and 2007, Sauvaire, who in 2003 shot a documentary in Colombia involving teen violence in “Carlitos Medellin, lived in the same house as the boys.
He developed such a rapport with them that he stayed in Liberia for another year after he had finished shooting.
And he set up the Johnny Mad Dog foundation, where the children can eat, sleep, attend courses and receive counseling.
Eventually, Sauvaire hopes to raise funds to develop the foundation into a non-governmental organization that will serve other child soldiers in the community. -AFP
