What else is showing

When you are all finished beating the evening traffic into Garden City, queuing for ages to get a half-price ticket (naye, is it just me or is the Cineplex ticket booth increasingly incompetent? Really all they have to do is take your money and hand you a slip of paper!), squeezing past the millions of other di Caprio fans and sitting down to the ridiculously intense knock-your-socks-off crazy-sick 2 hour mind orgasm that is Inception (but fuck that ending. Me I’ve refused) ….

….when you’re done with that, please get another ticket (it’s half-price, don’t be cheap) to see The Silent Army. You probably won’t thank me after — I have no high praise for it myself. It is another case of African movie, white protagonist and doesn’t manage to let go of the usual stereotypes. Modelled closely on our own LRA war, it is set in a fictitious African country in which a rebel group is leading an insurgency, it follows a Dutch cook who goes looking for his son’s best friend Abu – a young African boy who has been abducted by the rebels.

It highlights the evil brainwashing involved in child abduction and induction into rebel (or any other) armies, the hypocrisy of Western-funded African conflicts and all those other lovely things that go with war on the continent.

I’m asking you to see this film because you will enjoy Abby Mukiibi’s turn as General Obeke, the depraved rebel leader; Sam Okello’s brief but evocative role as Abu’s wheelchair-bound father and of course Abu’s (Andrew Kintu) performance as a war-hardened child soldier.

See this film because you will probably walk out feeling quite proud of these 3 Ugandan actors.