Uganda, 1989. A young Acholi rebel guided by spirits, Joseph Kony, forms a new rebel movement against the government: the LRA, The Lord’s Resistance Army. An ‘army’ that grew by abducting teenagers – more than 60,000 over 25 years – from which fewer than half came out of the bush alive. Geoffrey, Nighty and Mike, a group of friends, as well as Lapisa, were among these youths, abducted at 12 or 13. Today, in their effort to rebuild their lives and go back to normal, they revisit the places that marked their stolen childhood. At the same time victims and murderers, witnesses and perpetrators of horrific acts that they did not fully understand, they are forever the ‘wrong elements’ that society struggles to accept.
INTERNATIONAL PREMIERE at the 2016 Cannes IFF
Jonathan Littell is a Franco-American writer and journalist who worked for many years for the NGO Action Against Hunger, primarily in Bosnia, Chechnya, Afghanistan and the DRC. His novel The Kindly Ones (Prix de l’Académie française and Prix Goncourt 2006) provided an in-depth exploration, through the Nazi experience, of the question of institutional violence and mass murder. He has since extended this questioning through essays, as well as numerous feature pieces for Le Monde and the review XXI: first during the 2008 war in Georgia, then in the DRC, in South Sudan and in Ciudad Juarez (Mexico). In early 2012, he spent three weeks in the embattled city of Homs in Syria and published a series of five long articles in Le Monde, before publishing his notes under the title Syrian Notebooks (2012).
Selected: Wrong Elements (2016)
