There is much to be taken away from a film in which, in the first 15 minutes, a child, no more than nine years of age, is shot and killed as an example for the other children to do as they are told.
Ezra is a Nigerian film about the 11-year civil war in Sierra Leone; it is about the real and the abstract: child soldiers, blood diamonds and AK-47’s, fire, and community—its ancestors, elders and the village—love, war, remembrance, forgiveness. It is especially about forgiveness, about love and war, about the three as experienced by the children, the child. Ezra.
He is the 16-year-old soldier who cannot remember killing his parents or others’ during the attack of his village. His story is fragmented, a collage of stolen lives told in flashbacks. His sister, Onitcha is witness to parts of his truth. Through the siblings’ accounts, Ezra is both boy and man.
His walk is so tall and hard, for everything and for nothing; the fire in his eyes is more a ravaging blaze than a rising sun; the gun he carries is an extension of his arm, less a symbol of manhood than a telling of childhood. But despite what he has seen and done, despite the war around and in him, he is found. Her name is Mariam, or Black Diamond. A soldier herself, though for a different camp, she chose this life. She also chose Ezra.
It is easy in the 110-minute production to forget that the story unfolding is the story of so many. The film points out that just eight years ago, nearly 120,000 children were serving as soldiers in Africa. Director and script writer, Newton I. Aduaka based the film in fact, and he did well to script and show not just the face of a child ripped from childhood and recast as a soldier but the spirit of this child as well.
A film so full of what war does can leave a viewer with many how’s and why’s, but this may not be Aduake’s sole purpose. Ezra is also about love. Represented unconditionally in Ezra’s sister Onitcha who receives a beating when she attempts to follow her brother instead of go home, love is reason enough to fight, to dance, to live.
In one scene, he sits with a sketch pad in hand drawing Mariam, now his wife. She leans into him, smiles, and whispers what his next action shows: On his pad, he makes round what was initially her flat belly. The scene reality-checks the viewer, reminds him or her again that this is a story of the boy who is also the man named Ezra. A smile floats past his lips as he looks down, too humbled to look into her, an act that suggests that love can be ageless and care not for lives taken, that it’s only to be received.
And, yes, with much to be taken away from a factual film as this, the softer side should not be discounted though the questions should come. Love that reaches beyond what was stolen or forgotten is reason enough.
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