Crises of a continent

By Robert W. Welkos

Oct. 19, 2006 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

IN the documentary “Uganda Rising,” we are introduced to the spectacle of thousands of African boys and girls making a nightly pilgrimage from their rural villages to nearby towns, seeking refuge so they won’t be abducted by a rebel group called the Lord’s Resistance Army and turned into child soldiers or -- in the case of the girls -- sex slaves.

In another film called “In a Soldier’s Footsteps,” a former Ugandan child soldier living in Denmark returns to Africa to free his son, who himself has become a child soldier.

And in “The Empire in Africa,” a film crew that initially went to Sierra Leone to document how rebel forces terrorize innocent men, women and children by hacking off their limbs, discovers that Western governments are ignoring similar atrocities conducted by the very troops brought in from neighboring countries to battle the rebels.

The documentaries, each with disturbing images rarely seen on the U.S. evening newscasts, are among 80 films -- features, documentaries and shorts -- screening at the 10th annual Hollywood Film Festival, which runs through Monday. The films will be shown at the ArcLight Cinemas in Hollywood.

Championing all of these films is Carlos de Abreu, the founder and executive director of the Hollywood Film Festival. An African of Portuguese descent who was raised in Mozambique, De Abreu and his family were forced to flee Mozambique in the mid-1970s when rebel forces overthrew Portugal’s colonial rule.

De Abreu said Western governments and prominent people, including former President Clinton and Microsoft founder Bill Gates, are trying to help Africa, but for the most part the West is ignoring the crisis on the continent, where “people are being cut and killed every day.”

The festival concludes Monday evening with a gala award banquet at the Beverly Hilton Hotel in Beverly Hills, where two African American actors who have been receiving early award-season buzz are scheduled to receive top honors. One recipient is Forest Whitaker, who is receiving the festival’s actor of the year honor for his role as 1970s Ugandan strongman Idi Amin in “The Last King of Scotland.” The other is Derek Luke, who will receive the festival’s “breakthrough actor of the year” award for “Catch a Fire,” in which he portrays a South African family man who turns to terrorism to fight the apartheid regime that brutalized his family.

“I think it’s great when people acknowledge your work,” said Whitaker, whose role in “Bird” captured best actor honors at the 1988 Cannes Film Festival. “I’ve been working a couple of decades now, working really hard, and for people to take a second and stop and say, ‘We appreciate your work, we like what you do,’ it means something to me.”

An actor’s research

Whitaker said that in the month prior to principal photography in Uganda on “The Last King of Scotland,” he conducted research on Amin, a flamboyant and menacing leader of almost mythic proportions, who ruled the eastern African nation with an iron fist for a decade. Whitaker said he watched documentaries, listened to audiocassettes, met Amin’s generals and government ministers and even conferred with one of the late dictator’s mistresses to try to understand the man. The actor also visited places where many tortures and murders occurred during Amin’s reign of terror.

“I got to see him in many different environments -- with children

During Amin’s rule, Uganda was plunged into economic ruin, and an estimated 300,000 people died. Amin was deposed in 1979 and went into exile with his five wives and dozens of children. He died in 2003 in Saudi Arabia at the age of 78.

Although Whitaker doesn’t make excuses for the depths of Amin’s cruelty, the actor noted that prior to coming to power in a bloody 1971 coup, Amin was considered by some to be a great soldier and leader.

“When you talk to Ugandans, they have mixed views about Amin,” Whitaker said. “On one hand, he killed hundreds of thousands of people. On the other hand, he liberated them.”

Amin was long gone by 2003, when Canadian producer Alison Lawton, the mother of two young boys, ventured into Uganda to make an educational film. The small film she initially envisioned would ultimately expand into a feature-length documentary after she discovered the nightly exodus of tens of thousands of children from rural villages as they tried to evade the Lord’s Resistance Army.

Each evening as the sun set in northern Uganda, she said, children were trained to grab their blankets and, often in bare feet, set out for safety in nearby villages where they would sleep under verandas, or in tents, or at the sides of roads in order to avoid being abducted from their huts by the LRA.

She estimates that during Uganda’s long civil war, 25,000 children have been abducted by the LRA, which is headed by a mysterious guerrilla fighter and cult leader named Joseph Kony.

“When I went there I was shocked to see what I saw -- and more shocked to find this was going on for close to 20 years,” Lawton said in a recent phone interview.

Repeated visits

Lawton traveled four times to northern Uganda, filming in refugee camps, listening to the stories of former child soldiers. “Some of these children were forced to commit atrocities that are unimaginable,” she said. “They were forced to beat other people with sticks until they were dead, throw babies into bushes, cut off ears, noses, lips. They were indoctrinated into the [LRA] with the idea this is an extended family and told they would be killed if they tried to escape.”

She said the Ugandan government tried to keep people safe by placing them in relocation camps spread around the north. But she called these shelters “glorified concentration camps” that are not policed, have no running water or medicine and are more vulnerable to attacks.

The United Nations has finally realized the enormousness of the crisis, she said, “but when we started the film it was not on the U.N.’s agenda.” Once numbering more than 10,000, the LRA’s troops have dwindled substantially. Last month, the rebels signed a truce to end 19 years of conflict. Meanwhile, the human rights group Amnesty International recently estimated that 11,000 children in the Democratic Republic of Congo are in the hands of armed groups or unaccounted for, with girls making up 40% of those children.

A soldier’s son

Another view of the child soldier controversy is found in Danish filmmaker Mette Zeruneith’s documentary “In a Soldier’s Footsteps.” The film is about a man identified only as Steven, a former child soldier in Uganda and a refugee in Denmark, who receives news that his 11-year-old son -- who had gone missing -- is alive but is himself a child soldier. Steven goes to Africa to free his son, but things go terribly wrong.

Altogether, the film took six years to produce. “The further we got into it, we couldn’t stop,” recalled Zeruneith, the mother of a young son. “We couldn’t pull out. Many times we wanted to.”

In “The Empire in Africa,” the focus turns to the West African nation of Sierra Leone, which has also been racked by years of civil war. Philippe Diaz, the film’s producer and director, concedes that some people have left theaters dissolved in tears midway through watching his documentary. It contains horrific images of unarmed civilians being gunned down in the streets by government-backed troops, crowds parading severed human heads on pikes, and children with amputated limbs.

Diaz’s camera recorded one scene where a screaming boy is taken into custody by government-backed troops, tied up in a bed of a pickup truck and taken to be tortured because, the director recalled, “they thought he may have been a rebel.”

robert.welkos@latimes.com

Hollywood Film Festival

African-themed films

* “In a Soldier’s Footsteps”: 1 p.m. Saturday

* “Uganda Rising”: 3 p.m. Sunday

* “The Empire in Africa”: 5 p.m. Sunday

* “Catch a Fire”: 5 p.m. Sunday (by invitation only)

Oliver Stone tribute

* “Salvador”: 3:30 p.m. Saturday

* “Born on the Fourth of July”: 6 p.m. Saturday

* “Platoon”: 5 p.m. Sunday

* “World Trade Center”: 7:30 p.m. Sunday