War Witch is a movie about somewhere in Africa, where everyone seems to be warmongering for an unknown reason (fighting either for or against "the government"), which was written and directed by someone in Canada. This movie is full of vague mysticism, witchery, magic, rape, gun violence, poverty and drug use.
Why is this the undercurrent of EVERYTHING we see about Africa?
Africa is this big amorphous blob where every country is the same, they are all uneducated, all violent, all money-hungry, all superstitious, all deeply scarred.
My dream is that someday, there's a movie that is written by a non-African, that is set in Africa, where the people portrayed are average, funny, dealing with normal day-to-day problems, working, going to school, etc. Because there are movies and stories by Africans, and a lot of them are about these kinds of things.
I went to a play in Ghana, written by a well-known Ghanaian playwright, that was all about this man who had grown up in Ghana, but went abroad to the UK for school, and then came back, and had affairs, and a bumbling, corrupt police officer was trying to extort money from him. It was really funny, and had a Ghanaian-identified set of problems.
War Witch was written with no specificity, which tells me that this filmmaker, and many people probably, think of all of Africa like this. I mean, there was even a scene where the two main characters stole some clothing from a laundry line, and the old grandma sleeping nearby woke up, and CHASED THEM WITH A MACHINE GUN.
Seriously? Grannies in this generic "sub-Saharan" country sleep clutching machine guns and then shoot them at children over a couple of t-shirts?
What is going on here? Why do we need Africa to be this terrifying? Does that say something about our zeitgeist? Are we writing off an entire continent?
There are places in Africa which have had some serious shit go down, yes. But that is not all of Africa. If that's a story you want to tell, why not go get a true story? Tell something that means something real, so that we can walk away from the movie with some kind of meaning, other than "Africans are all crazy." Honestly, that's the message I walked away from this with.
And I think that's a sad, untrue message.
Sorry to get so un-funny. But for reals. Africa is awesome, and beautiful, and annoying, and chaotic, and full of people that range from boring to obnoxious, from peaceful to violent, from superstitious to skeptical and scientific, from wise to foolish, just like every other place on earth. They deal with problems both big and small, and have complex ideas about the world around them. I just think it's sad that movies set in Africa only paint one type of picture.
But, if that idea doesn't bother you, then you can find some well-acted performances by the cast. The cinematography was too shakey-cam for me, but some people like that style.
Peggy's Rating: Two out of Five Stars
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