Review by: Linda Barnard, The Toronto Starrating: 3 and 1/2 out of 4 stars
The ghosts of murdered villagers that haunt a young girl brutally forced into slavery as a child soldier in Rebelle mirror the film’s dramatic effect on an audience.
Much of it is down to 14-year-old Congolese native and screen newcomer Rachel Mwanza, a one-time street kid found living in Kinshasa. Her natural and deeply moving performance as Komona, made to join a ragtag rebel force in an unnamed African country at age 12 amid unspeakable cruelty, is riveting. She earned best actress prizes at Tribeca (along with winning best narrative film) and Berlin film festivals.
Now a new accolade on the heels of its Canadian premiere at TIFF: as predicted by many, Montreal director Kim Nguyen’s Rebelle (War Witch) will be Canada’s entry in the Best Foreign Film Oscar race and deservedly so. It is difficult to watch and impossible to forget.
Komona acts as narrator for the film, speaking quietly to the baby that is growing inside her as she recalls the past two years of her life, an existence bracketed in violence, torment, magic, fleeting power and even rare moments of happiness.
We first see Komona with her family, in a gentle scene of tenderness as her mother braids the dozing child’s hair. Rebel soldiers trying to defeat the government in service of le Grand Tigre (Mizinga Mwinga) attack the village, forcing the first of many cruelties on her. Komona is forced to shoot and kill her parents.
She joins other children in the forest who march on without food, their senses dulled by the effects of a druglike tree sap, their route determined by a sorcerer who divines the future. Eyes dull, they train with sticks mimicking rifles, like kids do the world over in carefree play. “This is your mother and your father,” they are told over and over about the automatic weapons finally pressed into small hands.
Alone and despairing, Komona finds a protector in Magicien (Serge Kanyinda), a 15-year-old albino soldier who makes protective talismans from castoffs and chicken bones.
Surviving a gun battle convinces the rebel leader (Alain Bastien) Komona has magical properties and she becomes le Grand Tigre’s War Witch. It gives her temporary protection but no peace, and escape is the only plan for survival.
Perhaps she does have mystic powers, but Komona wants none of them. All she can see are ghosts in the forest, murdered villagers who silently accost her, seeking, if not justice, then remembrance.
Chin out, gaze steady, Komona rarely appears as a victim, even when she is wiping her eyes, crying out in fear or telling her unborn child she vowed to keep her tears “inside my eyes.”
Nguyen, who wrote the Rebelle script after reading a news report about a Burmese child soldier, tells Komona’s story in layers, careful not to overwhelm. It is sometimes a difficult task; her subjection to horrors seems infinite. But there are adults who show kindness and care, like Magicien’s gentle uncle Butcher, who has also suffered shocking cruelty.
His advice to the young couple who come to him wanting to be married includes a quest that adds notes of joy to the otherwise bleak chorus of their lives and lets them actually behave like children for a rare spell.
It serves to remind the audience that these two are indeed just youngsters, the same kids who, had they been born in the first world, would be bugging parents for a new cellphone or a ride to the mall. It’s a shocking realization each time Komona is forced into even more painful and exploitive situations, events that would hobble most adults.
Hers is a story that’s being played out around the world in conflict zones where cowardly adults make children do unspeakable things. What Rebelle introduces into that narrative is a notion of hope and resilience in the heart of a child.
Official Trailer