Wrong Elements

The list of unspeakable things that unfold in this documentary is appalling. The sum of the atrocities committed during the conflict it depicts is equally appalling; 60,000 children abducted and turned into soldiers in 25 years, 100,000 dead, 2 million displaced. The mathematical laws surrounding evil are unambiguous; violence begets violence. And tirelessly, the same question is asked: how do we break the cycle? Yet, the perspective used by Jonathan Littell to answer this question - he who had staged the banality of evil through the memoirs of an SS officer in his landmark novel The Kindly Ones - is precisely that of ambiguity. By giving voice to former child soldiers, Littell ventures into the delicate zone that separates the victims from the perpetrators.

Kidnapped as children, taken away from their families, subjected to the worst treatments, these young adults now reveal their violent past to the camera. If the confidences are terrifying, it is impossible not to see them as victims of the mystical torturers who guided the ranks of the LRA. But when a former commander accused of war crimes and brought to trial at the International Criminal Court in The Hague confesses that he himself was abducted at the age of 10 and forcibly recruited, does the concept of victim still stand? When a man attempts to murder a former child soldier to avenge his decimated family, who would call him insane? The boundaries between right and wrong are porous here and plunge us into a great moral vertigo. It will take a lot of resilience for the seeds sown by the violence of the last few years to grow into something other than hate. But the smiles on the faces of the three protagonists and their supportive camaraderie perhaps hint at some sense of hope.

Naomie Décarie-Daigneault
Tënk's Artistic Director