Children are the same everywhere, except the ones living in a Cameroon civil war zone tell stories of people being blown up and make art and drawings about tanks and guns.

Director Cyrielle Raingou lets us observe the daily life of three children. Falta lives with her mother and four younger siblings and keeps asking to hear the story of how her father died. Brothers, Mohamed and Ibrahim, were liberated from a camp run by the terrorist group Boko Haram (a Sunni Islamic extremist group) and have lost all hope of finding their parents.

Such is the danger, armed soldiers guard the school in the village. We watch the children at school, which seems to be the only hope for more. Mohamed and Ibrahim are uninterested in learning, though. Education has no value compared to the money you can earn picking onions or herding goats. They talk of being soldiers, of chopping off heads, but are so young they fight and cry over childish things.

It could be a depressing story, but the quiet closeness allows us to see the vibrancy of detail, the ordinariness of lives – hopes, fears, delight in new clothes – that seems universal. We have a little less belief in witchcraft, though. I had to look away at the chicken sacrifice.

Director: Cyrielle Raingou
Origin: Cameroon, France
Language: Hausa with English subtitles
Genre: Documentary

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