Raymonde Provencher, director. Grace, Milly, Lucy . . . Child Soldiers.2010. 52 minutes. Canada/Uganda. Women Make Movies. $295.00.

Abstract

Raymonde Provencher, director. Grace, Milly, Lucy.. . Child Soldiers. 2010. 52 minutes. Canada/Uganda. Women Make Movies. $295.00.Grace, Milly, Lucy . . . Child Soldiers is portrait of three Ugandan women who were captives and girl soldiers injoseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army. Grace of the film's title is Grace Akallo, co-author of Girl Soldier: A Story of Hope for Northern Uganda's Children (Chosen Books, 2007), founder of the NGO United Africans for Women and Children's Rights, and an accomplished international speaker on the themes of gender, youth, and militarism in Africa. Milly is Milly Auma, one of the four founders of Empowering Hands, Ugandan organization that offers community-based counseling to former abductees and displaced people. Lucy refers to Lucy Lanyero, woman about whom little is known beyond what appears in the film.The film opens on dark field of tall grasses with Grace's voice-over narrating the night of her abduction. Underneath, the soundtrack carries the mournful tones of string instruments and scattered insect songs, punctuated by the click-clack of an automatic weapon being loaded. We are told that Grace was student at St. Mary's College, Aboke, when militants launched late night raid and forced the schoolgirls to march barefoot into the bush, under threat of death by panga. Grace delivers terrifying retelling of how the schoolgirls were sorted into two categories: the small girls and the big girls. latter were allowed to leave following the desperate pleadings of one of the schoolteachers, while the small girls, Grace included, were fated to be left with the militants. Any thought of escape was vanquished with death threats against the would-be escapee or her friends. schoolgirls were told that if one member of the group of twenty-nine attempted to escape, the other twenty-eight would immediately be killed. About two weeks after her abduction, Grace learned firsthand just how precarious life had become. Just when the band of captives and keepers was about to enter into Sudan, one girl tried to escape but was caught. other girls were ordered to beat her to death and each picked up some small implement that she could use to put on convincing performance of brutality. Impatient with these schoolgirls who had not been fully transformed into girl soldiers, Grace tells us simply, The rebels hit her with an axe on the head. And she died.On the film's website (macubainternational.com), the director describes the work as a film on the fate of girl soldiers in Uganda. It would be more apt to say that it is memoir of girl soldiers and their postcaptivity lives. three girls stand in for three fates. In some ways, Grace, who was abducted as teenager and spent seven months in captivity, can be said to have formed the most successful postcaptivity life of the three. It is one that has taken her far away from the site of her childhood horrors to the rarefied halls of the United Nations and liberal colleges in Massachusetts. On the other extreme we have Lucy, who was abducted at age nine and spent ten years in captivity. In the film Lucy always appears to be two steps away from complete breakdown. She is tormented by mysterious sweats and evil spirits, requiring her to make numerous visits to the local herbalist. She is haunted by the actions of her past life, when she was known as Lance Corporal Lucy. But she seems to be also disturbed by subtly nagging pull to return to the bush. She is distrusted and kept at some distance by other former abductees who remembered the notorious Lance Corporal Lucy as mean and a hard person, as someone who took pleasure in discriminating between original LRA and those who were mere recruits.Milly was one of Lucy's co-wives in the harem of an fighter. She too was abducted at age nine and held in captivity for ten years. Her outcome or fate lies somewhere in the middle of the three. Like Lucy, she remains in Northern Uganda where she has to face the accusations and condemnations of those who were left behind-people like her new mother-in-law. …