Promoting African Film Industry

Opening night of Ezra at the AFI sliver spring MD. Ezra by Nigerian filmmaker Newton Aduaka paints a grim picture of how innocence is lost on a battle field somewhere in Africa. Ezra becomes the first dramatic feature to do justice to this frightening phenomenon
Thousands of children where kidnapped by armies of child trafficker and transformed into child-soldiers. Many were already orphaned by years of civil war. They find a new kind of family in the military that captures them body and soul.

In the movie, at a school in sierra Leone, a boy named Ezra, with his classmates, watch as a group of guerillas kill one of their teachers while kidnapping them. The weaker children are shot. The rest become soldiers in the people's revolutionary front, a radical militia group during the last decade.
Ezra’s story is told in a series of flashbacks: brainwashed by the military, he's given powerful amphetamine shots that keep him awake for days, destroy his capacity for conscience and wipe out any memory of the bloody events in which he participates.

Young Ezra was only seven-years old when rebels abducted him and spirited him into the jungle for military training. Seven long years have passed since that fateful day, and as Ezra struggles to recall the details of a deadly village raid which has become the subject of a truth and reconciliation committee investigation, the boy's mute sister reveals a long gestating secret that puts his entire life in a whole new light

Ezra won more than five top prizes, other films from Angola, Burkina Faso, Chad, democratic republic of Congo, guinea, Liberia, mail, Namibia, Nigeria, Senegal and south Africa. Were also featured.