What a gift (though a painful one) to have caught Johnny Mad Dog at a Melbourne Film Festival screening yesterday. The audience was left breathless by this confronting and brutal film. From the first frame, director Jean-Stephane Sauvaire's adaptation of Emmanuel Dongala's novel held the audience captive with its visceral depiction of the lives of two children (though it's sometimes hard to remember that's what they really are) caught up in the careless tornado of civil war.
Reminiscent in style and tone of Fernando Meirelles' Cidade de Deus (City of God), the film follows Johnny Mad Dog, a 15-year-old soldier fighting raging hormones and the overpowering effects of systematic brainwashing, and Laokole, a 13-year-old girl fighting to save her crippled father and little brother.
The story is relatively simple, but the sense of danger and horror is always palpable, making it impossible to look away even when faced with scenes of depraved and unconscionable (though only occasionally graphic) violence. This violence feels justifiable, though, in the context of the closing montage, which shows graphically just how widespread and damaging the problem of child soldier recruitment really is. Sauvaire deliberately makes the geographical setting ambiguous, so it could be a story taking place in any number of countries, as it actually is.
It's obvious that Sauvaire and his cast of non-professional actors, many of whom brought to the film first-hand experience of the horrors of child soldier combat, have a driving urge to tell this story, to expose the truth about the consequences of involving children in violence, and the shocking hypocrisy when they are dumped, uncared for, at war's end.
There is nothing sanitised about Sauvaire's depiction of this hopeless situation; it is not for the faint-hearted. But it is a film for those who are willing to be challenged and provoked by an exceptional piece of cinema and human storytelling.
Reminiscent in style and tone of Fernando Meirelles' Cidade de Deus (City of God), the film follows Johnny Mad Dog, a 15-year-old soldier fighting raging hormones and the overpowering effects of systematic brainwashing, and Laokole, a 13-year-old girl fighting to save her crippled father and little brother.
The story is relatively simple, but the sense of danger and horror is always palpable, making it impossible to look away even when faced with scenes of depraved and unconscionable (though only occasionally graphic) violence. This violence feels justifiable, though, in the context of the closing montage, which shows graphically just how widespread and damaging the problem of child soldier recruitment really is. Sauvaire deliberately makes the geographical setting ambiguous, so it could be a story taking place in any number of countries, as it actually is.
It's obvious that Sauvaire and his cast of non-professional actors, many of whom brought to the film first-hand experience of the horrors of child soldier combat, have a driving urge to tell this story, to expose the truth about the consequences of involving children in violence, and the shocking hypocrisy when they are dumped, uncared for, at war's end.
There is nothing sanitised about Sauvaire's depiction of this hopeless situation; it is not for the faint-hearted. But it is a film for those who are willing to be challenged and provoked by an exceptional piece of cinema and human storytelling.