lorayork Like the Humane Society ads with Sarah McLachlan whining in the background, I was actually afraid to watch a documentary like this.But it was so incredibly, sensitively and beautifully filmed, scored and produced that I am speechless. It is IMO a damn near perfect documentary.The exposition of the stories of just three of the 50,000 children in the camp was skillfully done--but so, so real. I don't know how they got this footage from these children. It was obvious they were confronting their memories for the first times --in all three cases.But the nationwide music and dance competition was exactly what both the viewer and the children were in need of--relief from pain.I am in awe of what has been done here. I leave it with just one question: What can *I* do?

Anna Laswson I thought that this movie was truly amazing and so eye opening! I was in shock when i saw this because though I knew that there was a war going on, i didn't realize how bad it really was. I think that this movie was wonderfully made and that they deserved that Oscar. I also think that the three main kids (Dominic, Rose and Nancy) were such nice kids and happy kids even though they had to go through all that. I got to meet Dominic and he is a truly wonderful kid. He is so nice and doing really well.Also, in case anyone wanted to donate money to AMREF (one of the sponsor's for the film) you can go on their website, www.amref.org and then they tell you how to donate there.

anyaismith DANCING AROUND GENOCIDE. Some scenes.. clearly staged and a Uganda government employee, Emmanuel Olobo of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was also a translator, raising questions about objectivity and the extent of the dictatorship's involvement in other aspects of the film; what's shocking is that Olobo's name is even listed on the credits at the end of the film, although he is not identified as a government official, until recently based in the Uganda embassy in Washington, D.C. as First Secretary, where he worked under Ugandan ambassador Perezi Kamunanwire, Uganda's chief apologist to the U.S. The film's most glaring weakness is failure to adequately expose the Museveni regime's role in creating the concentration camps and forcefully forcing Acholis, women, men and children into the camps (for more background please see the Human Rights Watch Report "Uprooted and Forgotten, Impunity and Human Rights Abuses.http://blackstarnews.com/?c=132&a=4253

groggo This superb documentary shows Acholi children from one village in the war zones of northern Uganda, who diligently prepare for the national musical and cultural competition in far-off and far-safer Kampala, the capital of Uganda.While they try hard to succeed, they are beset by the constant danger of abduction at the hands of the Lord's Resistance Army (MRA), which is led by a religious fanatic (and part-time mystic and fortune-teller) named Joseph Kony, who started an uprising against the Ugandan army in 1986, pledging to turn the country into a theocracy with a constitution loosely based on the Ten Commandments.Kony's army has abducted more than 30,000 children in northern Uganda and forced them to be soldiers and killers of their own tribal members. More than 200,000 children in northern Uganda have been orphaned because their parents were murdered. The LRA's 20-year war against the central government's Ugandan People's Defence Forces (UPDF), has left at least two million Ugandans displaced from their homes. Meanwhile, even in so-called 'safe camps,' where countless thousands live amid squalor and disease and depend on the United Nations food program, the UPDF still doesn't provide adequate protection. It is wonderful to watch these determined children turn on their smiles and their brilliant talents as they prepare for, and participate in, the national competition. When they arrive in Kampala (southern Uganda, where no warfare takes place), they are overwhelmed to see skyscrapers; they had never seen buildings before. Writers/directors Sean Fine and Andrea Nix have done a great job of conveying the wondrous dreams of young people, along with the terrible ordeals they face in a savage, senseless war that sees no end. One youth, in a stunning story of barbarism, recounts how he was ordered to butcher three farmers with a hoe, and if he looked away at any time, he himself would have been murdered. Such is the barbarism that exists in northern Uganda today, much of it all but unknown to us in the West.To make matters worse, there is blatant corruption in the central government itself, which enacted legislation in 2005 that will allow the corrupt lowlife Yoweri Musevini (elected in 1986) to be president-for-life. There are strong hints that he and Kony have an 'arrangement' to continue the war because it advances both of their 'causes,' although those 'causes' are not always readily apparent. Neither of these two lunatics appears to give a damn about the terrible pain they have inflicted on their own people.Another equally powerful documentary on this same subject is 'The Other Side of the Country' (2006), by Quebec filmmaker Catherine Hebert. This very disturbing film concentrates more on the older (and even aged) northern Ugandans who are displaced from their homes by war and forced to live out their lives in teeming, treacherous 'relocation' camps, which are really nothing more than disease-infested examples of the worst kinds of slums.