SUNDANCE FILM FESTIVAL

BACKSTORY: War/Dance
By Claiborne Smith

The conflict in northern Uganda between the Lord’s Resistance Army and the Ugandan government, which has cost tens of thousands of civlian lives and displaced 200,000 children, is an unusually complex and internecine quagmire that has been consistently underreported. That would be one good reason to tell the story of the 19-year-old war from the perspective of three magnetic children who have been victimized by the conflict, as Sean and Andrea Nix Fine do in their lyrical and compassionate documentary War/Dance, one of the more genuinely affecting and heartwarming movies at the Festival this year.

Another good reason is because you had been hired by someone who wants nothing less than to end the exploitation of children. War/Dance is the first documentary produced by Shine Global, a nonprofit established by former Nickelodeon and Spike TV president Albie Hecht and his wife Dr. Susan MacLaury to use documentary films to help end the abuse and exploitation of children. Several years ago, Hecht approached the Fines, who are married and have a history of shooting footage in dangerous conditions, to see if they might be interested in making a documentary about the children victimized by the Ugandan conflict.

Hecht had some ambitious goals when he called the Fines to gauge their interest. “I want to see it in theaters, I want it to look great, I want it to be in Sundance...” “We thought, ‘No pressure...!’”

— Andrea Fine, War/Dance

There has been no dearth of documentaries about Africa recently, but War/Dance is one of the most memorable ones. Rose, Dominic, and Nancy, the three children selected by the Fines to be the focal points of the movie, are determined students at Patongo Primary School in the Patongo War Zone Displacement Camp. Watched over by government soldiers to protect them from sudden LRA ambushes, the residents of the camp are like prisoners, but they are determined to overcome their circumstances. The children are eager to get on a bus to Kampala, Uganda’s capitol, to dance and sing while representing their tribe in the country’s National Music Competition. Given their poor and blighted circumstances, that they actually even arrive there is a little miracle.

Hecht had some ambitious goals when he called the Fines to gauge their interest. “I want to see it in theaters, I want it to look great, I want it to be in Sundance,” Sean Fine recalled Hecht saying. “We thought, ‘No pressure, man!’” Andrea said.

And that was before Sean arrived in northern Uganda. The Ugandan government has to give permission to anyone who wants to cross from southern Uganda into the war-torn northern part of the country, and the military’s PR officer planned on making Sean travel with a military escort wherever he went, at his own expense (“as an independent filmmaker, that’s not going to work,” Sean said, almost as an afterthought). The Fines have a two-year-old son, and Andrea stayed home in the United States while Sean called her every night at 4:00 a.m. Uganda time to talk about the footage he had downloaded (cell phones worked in the camp, but only by climbing as high as possible up a particular brick wall). “She could see the footage and say, ‘Did you think about doing it this way?’” Sean recalled. “Both of our heads were out there.”