The Producers

After earning a Bachelor’s degree in Communication at the Université du Québec à Montréal, Catherine Hébert entered the graduate program in international journalism offered jointly by Université Laval and the École supérieure de journalisme in Lille, France. She then did an apprenticeship at RTBF, the Belgian public broadcaster, and worked as a cooperant in Senegal. On returning to Montréal, she was hired as a researcher and assistant director for the documentary War Babies, about children born of war rape. In 2002, she began directing news reports for Points Chauds, an international news program broadcast on Télé-Québec. Her first documentary, Tea at the Embassy, describes the struggle of an 80-year-old activist and former prisoner of war in the Japanese concentration camps. In spring 2004, she filmed a news report on one of today’s most under-reported conflicts, the war that rages in northern Uganda; Mangos for Charlotte was broadcast the following autumn on Télé-Québec. In 2006, she directed The Face I once Had, a reports that looks at acid attacks on women in Bangladesh. It won Best News Report at the 2006 Prix Gémeaux, honouring French-language achievement in Canadian television. Moved by what she saw during her stay in Uganda, Catherine Hébert returned for three months, during which she filmed the feature documentary The Other Side of the Country. Her most recent reports looks at the failures of micro credit in Bangladesh and at the work of Julienne Lusenge, an activist committed to women’s rights and the struggle against sexual violence in DRC.

Making The Film

I first set foot in northern Uganda in April 2004. To get there, you have to cross the Karuma Bridge over the Nile at a spot where the current is particularly strong. Once in the North, a strangely deserted region appears. There is not a village in sight and no livestock in the fields. It is as though the entire country were sleeping. You see no visible scars of war, other than a few skeletal huts. Everything has been dismantled by the encroaching weeds. After 20 years of fighting, the northern part of the country is a shadow of its former self, its social fabric destroyed, its resources rotted away, and its people slowly dying. I could not believe that the conflict that has been tearing this country apart for 20 years had received so little attention.

Uganda and its people force us to rethink our definition of war, too often restricted to violent imagery. In northern Uganda, what you see is the serial destruction, extraordinary but not spectacular, of an entire society. It was for this reason I wanted to make a personal film, not one satisfied to show the conflict alone, but one that would bring it to life from the inside, as seen from the perspective of the people. It is their story that constitutes the starting point of the film, taking the viewer towards the participants, each of whom suffers the horrors of war daily and in their own way. By resisting, they manage to keep alive the humanity in all of us. The stories are each told separately, but they converge at a single reality – that of an insidious, endless war, not explosive but omnipresent, fuelled by political interests that go unacknowledged but are not hard to see.

I conducted research for a whole month, without any camera. The recording then done in two trips —over six weeks in all— with a crew consisting of director, cameraman, soundgirl and a guide and driver from Northern Uganda. The film was shot clandestinely, as the government did not allowed unaccompanied journalist of film crew further than 40 km from the capital. The people who participated in the film have shown an incredible courage, and we are still in touch with them.

At this writing, no Ugandan north of the Nile has been spared, neither children nor old people. Rarely has a war gone so little noticed. Yet all it takes is a short trip across the Nile to hear voices piercing the silence – a silence as inexplicable as it is disturbing.