Plan interviews acclaimed filmmaker
Ezra, a film about a former child soldier, has won the top prize at the 2007 African Film Festival, FESPACO, as well as Plan’s Special Child Rights Award and the United Nations Peace Promotion Prize.
Directed by Nigerian filmmaker Newton Aduaka, Ezra tells the story of a former child soldier attempting to find internal peace after the horrors he had witnessed and committed as a combatant in Sierra Leone’s decade-long civil war.
An established filmmaker, Newton has won critical acclaim and awards for his film “Rage” (2000) as well as for earlier films “Carnival of Silence “(1994), “Voices Behind the Wall” (1990) and “On The Edge” (1997). Newton also directed the 2002 short film “Funeral,” commissioned by the Cannes Film Festival.
After receiving his prize at FESPACO — and one day after being awarded Plan’s Special Child Rights Award — Newton sat down with us for a short interview:
What prompted you into making this movie?
It was twenty years of accumulation, exploded into the screen.The film was in a major part inspired by the situation in Sierra Leone and conflicts in Ivory Coast, Chad, Mozambique Angola, and Rwanda. Children are told they are fighting one thing but they don’t actually know what they are dying for. This, for me, is very tragic: people dragging children into situations they should never see or even think of.
The Plan prize to you was decided by four young people and two adults. How do you feel receiving the UN peace promotion and Plan’s Prize?
I feel overwhelmed and I hope “Ezra” will help Plan and the UN institutions that awarded the film in what they are doing.
It was a difficult film for me to make because of myself being a child of war. I did not realize how much a child keeps in his subconscious when he goes through war. You live with it, it forms you. I was afraid that I would not be able to communicate.
Coming back to the film, the reaction to it is beyond my expectations. I saw that the Plan jury was young people; it means the film is really connected to people and I hope then, that people do not just see it as a film, but that they spent some time meditating on what they understand from it, because it is a film about the future of African children.
What does the grand prize, the Yennenga Stallion, mean to you?
This is a symbol to me to keep doing what I am doing. My cinema is really engaged, direct, and clear. Things are too desperate. It is time for clear speaking and not ambiguous cinema. I think that we have crossed a barrier which made us so inhuman. War brings nothing but destruction. While the background of all this is the exploitation of minerals and oil, the children who fight don’t even know about it. There is nothing in war but profit for some people while the rest see their lives destroyed. To take a life, to premeditate it, is crossing the line. We have to go back to what I believe is human. It is not human to kill or make any act that causes you or anybody to kill. Either by proxy, by signing up for troops to go and kill, by signing up to ship arms into a country for children to kill are terrible things. We have to move away from that.
How can you help?
Sponsor a child in Sierra Leone — When you sponsor a child, you are telling a child that somebody cares about him and his future. Your sponsorship will help fund community projects that help sponsored children and other children in communities build a better future.
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