Canada Once Again at the Oscars: Kim Nguyen’s Rebelle, the Tale of an African Girl Child Soldier

Abstract

In 2013, for the third year in a row, a Canadian film by a Québec director was named a finalist for the US Oscar in Best Foreign Films. Kim Nguyen’s Rebelle (War Witch), about child soldiers in Africa, continued and expanded the focus on international issues that had characterized the two previous Canadian nominees, Denis Villeneuve’s Incendies and Philippe Falardeau’s Monsieur Lazare. One of the few films to treat the worldwide problem of children abducted and forced to participate in combat, Rebelle is unusual in taking as its central character a young girl. Although Komona is forcibly abducted, made to shoot her own parents and engage in combat, Nguyen also allows his character a romantic relationship and a surprisingly happy ending. In detailing the steps of his girl soldier’s reintegration into society, accompanied by her illegitimate child, Nguyen’s project seems to echo the findings of important studies sponsored by the Canadian International Development Agency.

Keywords:

• Rebelle
• Kim Nguyen
• child soldiers
• Canadian film
• Oscar nominee

Notes

1. Mwanza received the award for Best Actress at the Berlin Film Festival, the Tribeca Film Festival in New York, the Canada Screen Awards in Toronto, and the Jutra awards in Montreal.

2. There is, to our knowledge, only one prior film about a girl soldier, Heart of Fire (2009) by Italian director Luigi Falorni, available only in an Italian language version. However, the “memoir” on which it is based, Senait Mehari’s (2007, 2008) Heart of Fire, originally written in German, has been charged with falsification and been discredited by several successful libel suits brought by people whom Mehari portrays (http://www.cbc.ca/news/arts/publisher-admits-errors-in-memoir-of-child-soldier-1.770902, updated 4–21-2008). There is no reason to believe that Nguyen was familiar with this film.

3. The play was translated as The Sound of Cracking Bones (Lebeau 2010) and included in Louise Forsyth’s 2010 anthology of Québec’s Women’s Plays in English Translation.

4. A second account of the abduction of girls by Joseph Kony’s LRA appears in Aboke Girls: Children Abducted in Northern Uganda (de Temmerman 2001). A recent novel, Thirty Girls by Suzanne Minot (2014), is based on the story of a girl soldier, one of the abducted Aboke girls, but it appeared in 2014, long after Nguyen’s film had been released. Of course the 2014 abduction of more than 300 girls from a school in Nigeria by the Boko Haram rebel army has profound echoes of such horrific actions.

5. In a subsequently interesting echo of this invented white rooster, Susan Minot includes in her 2014 novel a reference to Joseph Kony’s order to his rebel troops to destroy all the white chickens in the area where they are encamped. There is no mention of a reason for this order. Minot also refers to the “tipus”—the dead spirits who appear to the Ugandan protagonist in her dreams—similar to Komona’s white-painted ghosts.

6. The three studies cited by Denov include the following:

Vivi Stavrou, Breaking the Silence: Girls Abducted During Armed Conflict in Angola. Report for the Canadian International Development Agency, 2004.

Myriam Denov and Richard Maclure, Child Soldiers in Sierra Leone: Experiences, Implications and Strategies for Reintegration, Report for the Canadian IDA, 2005.

Susan McKay and Dyan Mazurana, Where Are the Girls? Girls in Fighting Forces in Northern Uganda, Sierra Leone, and Mozambique: Their Lives During and After War Montreal: International Centre for Human Rights and Democratic Development, 2004.

^7. The official terminology for this stage of a former child soldier’s life is DDRR: disarmament; demobilization; rehabilitation; and reintegration (See Dallaire 2010, 176–78; Honwana 2006, 97).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Paula Ruth Gilbert

Mary Jean Green, who received her PhD in French literature from Harvard, was hired at Dartmouth College in the Department of French and Italian in 1973 during the first wave of women faculty after co-education. Her interest in the politics of literature led her career toward women writers and feminist critique as well as the Francophone world outside France, especially Québec. Her work and teaching then expanded to encompass works in French from sub-Saharan Africa and the Maghreb. She co-initiated the first courses at Dartmouth wholly devoted to Francophone literature.

Mary Jean Green

Paula Ruth Gilbert, who holds a PhD in French from Columbia University, is professor of French, Canadian, and Women and Gender Studies in Modern and Classical Languages/Women and Gender Studies and a faculty affiliate in Cultural Studies and New Century College at George Mason University. She specializes in Québec Studies and French and Francophone women writers, nineteenth-century French Studies and the study of Paris, gender and violence, and gender and human rights narrative. She has published numerous articles and essays and has written or edited several books.