Ezra is the first film to give an African perspective on the disturbing phenomenon of abducting child soldiers into the continent’s recent civil wars. It was awarded the Grand Prize at the 2007 Festival Panafricain du Cinema à Ouagadougou (FESPACO), Africa’s largest and most prestigious film event, and was selected for the International Critics Week at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival. Ezra stands out among other African films because it is a complex psychological study, not just of the brutalizing, healing and reintegration into society of one of thousands of traumatized former child soldiers, but also as a key for reconstructing these societies themselves. Ezra is structured around the week-long questioning of a 16 year old boy, Ezra, before a version of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, created in Sierra Leone in 2002 in the wake of its decade long civil war. This hearing is then inter-cut with chronological flashbacks to pivotal moments during Ezra’s ten years in the rebel faction which made him who he is. These commissions, based on the idea of transitional justice and modeled on the one in South Africa, were meant not to be punitive but restorative and therapeutic, both for the violated and the violators. Only after Ezra confronts his crimes, how he came to commit them and repents, will he be ready to rejoin society as well as make peace with himself. In a sense, the audience is placed in the position of the judges, initially seeing Ezra only in terms of his crimes against humanity, but, gradually coming to realize he is more a victim than a victimizer. The 16 year old Ezra who appears before the tribunal is an unsympathetic, angry, deeply disturbed young man. He takes no responsibility for the atrocities he committed, rationalizing that he was a soldier, and soldiers kill, so why should he be brought before the Commission? He falls back on political justifications, arguing that he was just a fighter for equality and against corruption in Sierra Leone. He is in such deep denial about his past crimes that he suffers from amnesia; some might label him as suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome.The film begins, however, by showing us another Ezra, a carefree six year old on his way to school on a calm summer morning, July 13, 1992. Just as class begins, the quiet erupts into mayhem, as a squad of insurgents, firing machine guns, bursts into the schoolyard and randomly kidnaps a dozen children, including Ezra. When one boy begins to cry, he is shot without a second thought, further terrorizing the children. They immediately set out on an exhausting, day and night, forced march, swallowed up by the dense, disorienting jungle, until they reach the distant rebel camp. There they confront the intimidating warlord, Rufus, who, like any effective totalitarian, immediately begins to strip them of their old identities to impose a new one on them. He orders them to forget their past, forget religion, forget their families: from now on the Brotherhood is their only family, they are reborn as warriors, to fight and die for the cause. He rallies them to destroy the corrupt governing elite which had, in fact, colluded with Western diamond interests for thirty years to steal the nation’s vast wealth from its impoverished people.The story then skips forward; Ezra is now a teenager, armed with an AK 47, the leader of a rebel battalion, totally immersed in the culture of the Brotherhood, his peers substituting for his family, as gangs do in our own inner cities. The government has called an election and the rebels have declared anyone who votes an ‘enemy of the people.’ Their slogan, ‘No Hands, No Vote,’ gave rise to one of the most heinous and distinctive crimes of Sierra Leone’s civil war: the mass amputation of people’s hands. On January 6, 1999, Ezra’s battalion is ordered to attack and exterminate three villages. Each soldier is injected with methamphetamines and they begin a ruthless, four-day rampage, their brains exploding.