De l'autre côté du pays

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1h 24m | Documentary

Since coming to power in 1986, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni has to a great extent restored order in a country formerly on the brink of civil war and economic catastrophe, introducing reforms, improving human rights and implementing a hugely successful program that has virtually halted the spread of HIV/AIDS. Or, at least, that’s what has happened in the south of the country. In the north, rebel leader Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army continues to carry out acts of horrifying brutality, and kidnaps children – the UN estimates at least 20,000 so far – from villages, forcing them to train as soldiers, to kill or be killed.

Foregoing narration, the film allows these people to tell their own stories. A mother speaks of the day her daughter was kidnapped from her school, in broad daylight, with more than a hundred of her classmates. A young girl walks miles every evening from her village to the nearest town to sleep in a shelter called Noah’s Ark, one of many set up to keep children safe from abduction. A seven-year-old boy lives on the streets in the city because it is safer than the country. And we see the horrendous suffering of some of the estimated 1.6 million people forced to flee their homes to live in refugee camps – in theory places of safety, but in reality filled with squalor, disease and death.