WORLD WIDE LIFE BLOG: Wardance is in big screen in certain selected theaters in the US

This documentary tells the story of children from a northern Uganda IDP camp who defy all odds to participate in the national Ugandan dance competition. Today the documentary is in big screen in selected theaters around USA.

Co-directors Sean Fine and Andrea Nix use the ongoing rebel conflict in Uganda — and its tragic consequences for hundreds of thousands of displaced people — to provide a background for a national children's music and dance competition. About three dozen 10- to 14-year-olds from the Patongo Refugee Camp Primary School travel to Kampala for the big contest. Between rehearsals and performances, a handful of them relate their real-life horror stories. Some speak of parents being murdered by rebel soldiers; others tell of being forced by soldiers to murder strangers.

The International Communities and Ugandans even the more “enlightened” could not comprehend the real depth of suffering people of Northern Uganda has experience for the last twenty years due to this war and life in these camps. Civil war ravaged Uganda's northern districts since the National Resistance Army/Movement took power under Yoweri Museveni in 1986. The latest phase of the war, waged by the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), has lasted more than a decade and has been characterized by widely publicized atrocities committed by the LRA, including the forced abductions of thousands of children, massacres of civilians, and widespread rape, mutilation, and looting.

On the other hand the Ugandan Government's counterinsurgency were brutal, and the civilian population, primarily of Gulu and Kitgum districts, found itself caught between the violence of the LRA on the one side and the violence of the Ugandan Army, the Ugandan People's Defense Forces (UPDF), on the other. The abuses by the UPDF are now coming to light, despite denials by the Ugandan Government and silence from the international community about the “African new form of democracy.”

The UPDF forcefully displaced the civilian population of the north several times in the course of the war, the most recent round beginning in 1996. Approximately 350,000 of Gulu district's 400,000 people have been forced into what the Government calls "protected camps," ranging in size from 1000 to over 50,000 individuals.

For detail about this movie visit their website: