In the early ‘90s the West African country of Sierra Leone was devastated by a civil war that smoldered for more than a decade, ending in January 2002, after a massive UN peacekeeping effort. Throughout the war, many Sierra Leoneans fled to neighboring Guinea as refugees, where six of them formed a band, whose experiences are the subject of Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars. The musicians combine powerful lyrics of suffering with optimistic melodies from the outset of the film, when they sing around a fire, “When two elephants are fighting, the grass them a suffer,” symbolizing the conflict between the rebels and the government, and the people who paid the price. Members had endured their own hardships: the youngest member, Black Nature, the band’s rapper, had been separated from his parents and had lost hope of ever finding them. Mohamed witnessed the murder of his parents, then was forced to take part: “I beat my child until the child was dead and they came and amputated my hand,” he says in one scene. Throughout the film are bits of war footage, including a handless person cradling blown-off limbs, which are somehow more immediate because they are in a film, rather than on the TV news. The documentary also follows their return to Sierra Leone for the first time in at least a decade, and the recording of their first CD, resulting in their 2005 nomination as best new artist in the country.
Although the subject matter often begs the question of “how can human beings inflict such pain on each other?” the underlying theme is of hope and inspiration, that people who have been through such horrors can continue to fight.
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