War/Dance Review
In War/Dance directors Sean and Andrea_Nix_Fine follow a group of children living in a refugee camp from the Patongo Primary School as they attempt to win Uganda's National Music Competition. Like similarly structured documentaries before it, from Spellbound to Mad_Hot_Ballroom, War/Dance benefits from the sympathy evoked by kids striving to succeed and an inherit sports story that can be easily grafted over the messiness of real life. Though technically assured, these films tend to go for the easy emotional high over the patient cinéma vérité character studies that result in complex societal portraits like in the touchstone Hoop_Dreams.
Accordingly, the finest moments in War/Dance come from the naturalistic moments when the camera simply observes the children. Sean, who also handled the cinematography, has a good feel for natural light and color, playing the bright blues, purples, and greens of the children's clothing against the dirt and dust of the refugee camp. But the Fines are so pushy with directorial interference that such moments are scarce. Too many of the shots look fussy and slick with a broad manipulative pull reminiscent of advertising. Confessional camera interviews with the featured children -- Rose, Dominic, and Nancy -- are reminiscent of reality-television techniques with a similar purpose of creating a superficial viewer/subject relationship.
Most uncomfortable are scenes where the children are brought back to their former home, village, or place of abduction and made to talk about the unimaginably horrific experiences that led to they're ending up at a refugee camp. These trips feel set up, a gross exploitation of their pain. From a filmmaking point-of-view, the story does not unfold with any sense of natural discovery here, rather it's forced on us and the children through staged confrontation. When Nancy howls over her father's makeshift grave, the inappropriate intrusion of the spectator is palpable. (Her mother tells her not to because the noise might attract guerilla soldiers.) The camera lingers at a short distance, seemingly embarrassed to be there.
The first half of the movie, when the children are preparing to travel to Kampala for the competition, is the "war" portion. Once they travel to the modern city for the "dance," the movie concentrates on the reassuring and comfortable competition story. As one child touchingly states, "I'm excited to see what peace looks like." Having witnessed the horrors of their lives, we now see the beauty, life, and possibility of art.
The success of the children is certainly uplifting, if predictable given its predecessors. But the duality of the structure is awfully cut-and-dry. The idea of a dance competition being placed in comparison to the horrors of war is a flimsy conceit. There is no doubt ample material for a probing documentary of the children's lives, but the Fines seemed determined to shoehorn in their feel-good story instead. War/Dance won the documentary directing prize at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival. Craig Butler, Rovi
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