Beasts of No Nation (2015)
October 21, 2015 9:46 AM - Subscribe
A drama based on the experiences of Agu, a child soldier fighting in the civil war of an unnamed African country.
Be forewarned, this movie is disturbing
The film follows Agu from a happy childhood in a war torn country, through his transformation into a brutal child soldier at the abusive hands of the Commandant, and into his rehabilitation. The unknown Abraham Atta plays Agu. Idris Elba plays the Commandant.
From this Daily Kosarticle:
[T]his is a film where we watch a 12-year-old boy's systematic transformation into a killer of men, but we never lose sight that he, and the others around him, are children. And even though this is Abraham Attah's first role, with Attah winning the best newcomer’s award at the Venice Film Festival for his work in Beasts of No Nation, his performance of a stoic Agu speaks volumes through frustrated looks and meaningful glances. Where Iweala’s source novel uses Agu's made-up English of present participle verbs and inconsistently dropped articles to get across the thoughts of an African child under the pressure of a horrible situation, it's Attah's plaintive looks, even at Agu's worst moments, that build sympathy in the audience and convey his inner thoughts.
Be forewarned, this movie is disturbing
The film follows Agu from a happy childhood in a war torn country, through his transformation into a brutal child soldier at the abusive hands of the Commandant, and into his rehabilitation. The unknown Abraham Atta plays Agu. Idris Elba plays the Commandant.
From this Daily Kosarticle:
[T]his is a film where we watch a 12-year-old boy's systematic transformation into a killer of men, but we never lose sight that he, and the others around him, are children. And even though this is Abraham Attah's first role, with Attah winning the best newcomer’s award at the Venice Film Festival for his work in Beasts of No Nation, his performance of a stoic Agu speaks volumes through frustrated looks and meaningful glances. Where Iweala’s source novel uses Agu's made-up English of present participle verbs and inconsistently dropped articles to get across the thoughts of an African child under the pressure of a horrible situation, it's Attah's plaintive looks, even at Agu's worst moments, that build sympathy in the audience and convey his inner thoughts.
I will likely watch this, but holy Christ am I afraid of it.
posted by maxsparber at 11:43 AM on October 21, 2015
posted by maxsparber at 11:43 AM on October 21, 2015
A buddy of mine worked grip/electric on the movie.. we recorded a podcast episode a little over a year ago about what it was like (self link).
posted by starman at 3:01 PM on October 21, 2015 [2 favorites]
posted by starman at 3:01 PM on October 21, 2015 [2 favorites]
maxsparber, I watched this over the course of two nights while my family slept. I came to FanFare expecting it to already have been posted so I could find some solace in the words of others. And thus I was forced to make my first non-Ask post of my almost-10-year tenure here.
Watching this movie was hard but worth it. The settings are amazingly beautiful.
starman, thank you. Twenty minutes in and it's fascinating.
posted by Seamus at 4:16 PM on October 21, 2015
Watching this movie was hard but worth it. The settings are amazingly beautiful.
starman, thank you. Twenty minutes in and it's fascinating.
posted by Seamus at 4:16 PM on October 21, 2015
I am conflicted about this. I've watched the first half hour or so.
Cote d'Ivoire holds its first elections since the post-election violence in 2010 on Sunday. My friends are all holding their breath. My closest friend was in the army on the losing side and walked from Abidjan to refugee camps in Liberia with the army on the winning side more or less chasing him. He stayed there and didn't want to come back because he was afraid people would be waiting for him with reprisals, but his little sister got very sick and he had to get her back home. Another friend didn't see his wife and kids for two years because he sent them to Liberia to stay safe while he stayed with his farm. In July, everyone who lost family in the Crisis could register to begin the process for reparations. People waited in line outside the district hall for hours, every family had someone to claim. I don't want to be entertained by the trauma of people I love (or a simulation of that trauma in a Nameless West African Country).
posted by ChuraChura at 5:57 PM on October 21, 2015
Cote d'Ivoire holds its first elections since the post-election violence in 2010 on Sunday. My friends are all holding their breath. My closest friend was in the army on the losing side and walked from Abidjan to refugee camps in Liberia with the army on the winning side more or less chasing him. He stayed there and didn't want to come back because he was afraid people would be waiting for him with reprisals, but his little sister got very sick and he had to get her back home. Another friend didn't see his wife and kids for two years because he sent them to Liberia to stay safe while he stayed with his farm. In July, everyone who lost family in the Crisis could register to begin the process for reparations. People waited in line outside the district hall for hours, every family had someone to claim. I don't want to be entertained by the trauma of people I love (or a simulation of that trauma in a Nameless West African Country).
posted by ChuraChura at 5:57 PM on October 21, 2015
a simulation of that trauma in a Nameless West African Country
One of the reviews pointed out that it would be unusual at best to set a movie in a pretend/unnamed European country in the 1940s in order to abstractly explore genocide and warfare, but somehow that is normal with movies set in Africa. To me it detracted from the film and was an unnecessary abstraction. The movie was largely a pastiche of real events anyway, so why not add some specificity?
That aside, I really liked the movie. Idris Elba is of course good, as are most of the other actors. I liked the settings (I think it was mostly filmed in Ghana?), and I liked how the story centered on African characters. I think there was one scene with white UN workers driving by in a convoy, and another with an Asian man in the waiting room; it was such a relief to watch a movie that wasn't painfully centered on outsiders.
posted by Dip Flash at 8:38 PM on October 21, 2015 [2 favorites]
One of the reviews pointed out that it would be unusual at best to set a movie in a pretend/unnamed European country in the 1940s in order to abstractly explore genocide and warfare, but somehow that is normal with movies set in Africa. To me it detracted from the film and was an unnecessary abstraction. The movie was largely a pastiche of real events anyway, so why not add some specificity?
That aside, I really liked the movie. Idris Elba is of course good, as are most of the other actors. I liked the settings (I think it was mostly filmed in Ghana?), and I liked how the story centered on African characters. I think there was one scene with white UN workers driving by in a convoy, and another with an Asian man in the waiting room; it was such a relief to watch a movie that wasn't painfully centered on outsiders.
posted by Dip Flash at 8:38 PM on October 21, 2015 [2 favorites]
Actually, The Grand Budapest Hotel sort of does ... And their nebulous pseudo-Nazis made me super uncomfortable, though I didn't hear that from anyone else.
posted by ChuraChura at 8:59 PM on October 21, 2015
posted by ChuraChura at 8:59 PM on October 21, 2015
The film was intense and even though I saw where it was headed, it was similar to a car accident, the horror is compelling, you feel like you cannot look away, as if you must witness this event. Brilliant acting. Won't be surprised to see this win some Awards during the next year.
posted by Fizz at 8:37 AM on October 25, 2015
posted by Fizz at 8:37 AM on October 25, 2015
SO I finished this this morning, and I'm left impressed by the acting and technical aspects of this movie.
But ... I'm not entirely sure what the purpose of this movie is. This is a very straight "Here is the conventional wisdom (and one could even say stereotype) of how child soldiers work" story with, as Dip Flash mentions, a pastiche of a bunch of different conflicts with no specificity and, I would argue, no particular insights about child soldiers or conflict in Africa. This lack of specificity, and the dialect (which, again, isn't specific to a particular place but sounds "African") also bothered me about the book, for what it's worth.
Not every movie has to have a powerful message or critique or larger purpose, but because this movie kind of falls back on the way that Westerners think about Africa and violence in Africa, I think it should have a purpose beyond ... showing violence and conflict in Nameless African Conflict. Uzodinma Iweala, who wrote the book, did an interview with Slate and says:
For me, this movie wasn't as successful in those purposes as it could have been. I think it was problematic to choose to make a generic African Conflict instead of, say, a story about Sierra Leone (take Ishmael Beah's memoir as a template, maybe). African conflicts are already basically treated like one homogenous violent terrible savage way of fighting in Western media and imaginations, and I don't think that this adds much nuance to the conversation.
Also, this quote from Cary Fukunaga in a different interview irritated me quite a bit:
But ... I'm not entirely sure what the purpose of this movie is. This is a very straight "Here is the conventional wisdom (and one could even say stereotype) of how child soldiers work" story with, as Dip Flash mentions, a pastiche of a bunch of different conflicts with no specificity and, I would argue, no particular insights about child soldiers or conflict in Africa. This lack of specificity, and the dialect (which, again, isn't specific to a particular place but sounds "African") also bothered me about the book, for what it's worth.
Not every movie has to have a powerful message or critique or larger purpose, but because this movie kind of falls back on the way that Westerners think about Africa and violence in Africa, I think it should have a purpose beyond ... showing violence and conflict in Nameless African Conflict. Uzodinma Iweala, who wrote the book, did an interview with Slate and says:
What do you hope that audiences take away from Agu’s story?
There are two things, whether in the book or the film. One was: When you would read these newspaper articles—there are people who have done studies on how newspapers interpret the continent of Africa, and the coded language that’s used, in the same way that people write or speak about black people in the United States, there’s a whole lexicon, right?—for me it was like, you need to get beyond that. And the second thing was: You also can’t ignore that there are problems on the continent. So how do you bring those two things together? You need to look at how you humanize people within these difficult situations in which they’re living. Everybody thinks they are so far away from something like this, and you’re just not.
For me, this movie wasn't as successful in those purposes as it could have been. I think it was problematic to choose to make a generic African Conflict instead of, say, a story about Sierra Leone (take Ishmael Beah's memoir as a template, maybe). African conflicts are already basically treated like one homogenous violent terrible savage way of fighting in Western media and imaginations, and I don't think that this adds much nuance to the conversation.
Also, this quote from Cary Fukunaga in a different interview irritated me quite a bit:
We scouted Kenya, Uganda, Ghana ... Uganda was a pretty good candidate. We could bring in a lot of crew from Kenya, which is right next door, and it had a history of war. I would’ve had to adapt the story to take place there, but at least it would’ve been authentic. Ghana really hasn’t had a war like the one we’re describing, so that way the fictionalization of it is more of a stretch, but the kind of war we’re describing could still happen in Ghana.posted by ChuraChura at 11:49 AM on October 25, 2015 [1 favorite]
I'm left impressed by the acting and technical aspects of this movie.
I tend to agree. I just watched this the other night, and think it's well-made and well-acted. But it seems like the subject matter is...kind of lost on the filmmaker himself. Or that his grasp on it is irritatingly tenuous and the film succeeds in spite of that.
Following on the remarks about Ghana that ChuraChura mentioned, then he says, in reponse to this question:
Q: Someone told me there was a military general in the audience who’d witnessed that kind of genocide and said it was the most real portrayal he’d ever seen onscreen.
A: He was a Canadian general who had been in Rwanda for the U.N. when the genocide was happening. I can’t even remember what he said. I was just so nervous he was going to say something bad about the film.
He's referring to Romeo Dallaire here. As Dallaire notes at great length in his book Shake Hands With the Devil, it was the Ghanaian contingent that lent UNAMIR the only capability it had left after the Belgians and Bangladeshis pulled out (the latter were poorly trained and equipped, and once the shit hit the fan, quite useless). The Ghanaians refused to leave (there was a Tunisian contingent who also stayed, as well as a multinational cast of military observers and other personnel (Mbaye Diagne notable among them) - but Ghana was the backbone of the small force of the roughly 270 troops Dallaire was left with when the genocide began in earnest. Between 800,000 and 1 million people would be slaughtered in 90 days, and in the face of that, Dallaire had just these troops and only a handful of working vehicles, which included some broken-down APCs they towed into various locations as a bluff show of force.
Further, Ghana punches well above its weight in peacekeeping contributions to UN and African Union peacekeeping missions.
The other reason I'm kind of irritated about Fukunaga's "military general in the audience"-who-he-couldn't-name comment is that Dallaire's important in the immediate context of Beasts of No Nation, too, because he's devoted himself to countering the use of child soldiers. While first-person accounts like Ishmael Beah's should be given first priority here, I'd also recommend Dallaire's They Fight Like Soldiers, They Die Like Children: The Global Quest to Eradicate the Use of Child Soldiers as some further reading on the topic. There's also a documentary of the same name based on the book, with a telling scene in which Dallaire is asked about whether his account of a UN peacekeeper having to shoot and kill a child soldier is actually about him.
So, that was a bit of a digression, but I think it's germane to the director's remarks about his own film.
What Dip Flash said:
One of the reviews pointed out that it would be unusual at best to set a movie in a pretend/unnamed European country in the 1940s in order to abstractly explore genocide and warfare, but somehow that is normal with movies set in Africa. To me it detracted from the film and was an unnecessary abstraction. The movie was largely a pastiche of real events anyway, so why not add some specificity?
That aside, I really liked the movie. Idris Elba is of course good, as are most of the other actors. I liked the settings (I think it was mostly filmed in Ghana?), and I liked how the story centered on African characters. I think there was one scene with white UN workers driving by in a convoy, and another with an Asian man in the waiting room; it was such a relief to watch a movie that wasn't painfully centered on outsiders.
...kind of sums up what I liked and disliked about the movie.
And then the fact that Dallaire gave him some props for how realistic it was, despite its lack of specificity, says something too I guess.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 11:03 AM on January 9, 2016 [1 favorite]
I tend to agree. I just watched this the other night, and think it's well-made and well-acted. But it seems like the subject matter is...kind of lost on the filmmaker himself. Or that his grasp on it is irritatingly tenuous and the film succeeds in spite of that.
Following on the remarks about Ghana that ChuraChura mentioned, then he says, in reponse to this question:
Q: Someone told me there was a military general in the audience who’d witnessed that kind of genocide and said it was the most real portrayal he’d ever seen onscreen.
A: He was a Canadian general who had been in Rwanda for the U.N. when the genocide was happening. I can’t even remember what he said. I was just so nervous he was going to say something bad about the film.
He's referring to Romeo Dallaire here. As Dallaire notes at great length in his book Shake Hands With the Devil, it was the Ghanaian contingent that lent UNAMIR the only capability it had left after the Belgians and Bangladeshis pulled out (the latter were poorly trained and equipped, and once the shit hit the fan, quite useless). The Ghanaians refused to leave (there was a Tunisian contingent who also stayed, as well as a multinational cast of military observers and other personnel (Mbaye Diagne notable among them) - but Ghana was the backbone of the small force of the roughly 270 troops Dallaire was left with when the genocide began in earnest. Between 800,000 and 1 million people would be slaughtered in 90 days, and in the face of that, Dallaire had just these troops and only a handful of working vehicles, which included some broken-down APCs they towed into various locations as a bluff show of force.
Further, Ghana punches well above its weight in peacekeeping contributions to UN and African Union peacekeeping missions.
The other reason I'm kind of irritated about Fukunaga's "military general in the audience"-who-he-couldn't-name comment is that Dallaire's important in the immediate context of Beasts of No Nation, too, because he's devoted himself to countering the use of child soldiers. While first-person accounts like Ishmael Beah's should be given first priority here, I'd also recommend Dallaire's They Fight Like Soldiers, They Die Like Children: The Global Quest to Eradicate the Use of Child Soldiers as some further reading on the topic. There's also a documentary of the same name based on the book, with a telling scene in which Dallaire is asked about whether his account of a UN peacekeeper having to shoot and kill a child soldier is actually about him.
So, that was a bit of a digression, but I think it's germane to the director's remarks about his own film.
What Dip Flash said:
One of the reviews pointed out that it would be unusual at best to set a movie in a pretend/unnamed European country in the 1940s in order to abstractly explore genocide and warfare, but somehow that is normal with movies set in Africa. To me it detracted from the film and was an unnecessary abstraction. The movie was largely a pastiche of real events anyway, so why not add some specificity?
That aside, I really liked the movie. Idris Elba is of course good, as are most of the other actors. I liked the settings (I think it was mostly filmed in Ghana?), and I liked how the story centered on African characters. I think there was one scene with white UN workers driving by in a convoy, and another with an Asian man in the waiting room; it was such a relief to watch a movie that wasn't painfully centered on outsiders.
...kind of sums up what I liked and disliked about the movie.
And then the fact that Dallaire gave him some props for how realistic it was, despite its lack of specificity, says something too I guess.
posted by mandolin conspiracy at 11:03 AM on January 9, 2016 [1 favorite]
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posted by Seamus at 9:47 AM on October 21, 2015