A masterfully realised and deeply touching work on a most tragic event in recent Ugandan history. The documentary film by Australian filmmaker Ebony Butler unmasks the involvement of current Ugandan president, dictator and kleptocrat, General Yoweri Museveni, in the twenty-year-long genocide of the Acholi people of Northern Uganda. A humanitarian crisis that: was orchestrated by a US-backed leader, prolonged by UN inaction and ignored by the world-at-large.
The film features a range of Ugandans personally affected and involved in the genocide - former military officers, political figures, academics and ordinary villagers whose lives were ravaged by the violence they suffered under and witnessed firsthand. The picture that emerges is one of decades in which the people of Northern Uganda - in a continent historically besieged by imperial-mediated division and atrocity, dictators, foreign resource exploitation and poverty - suffered a fate that is recurrent in the annals of the region. It is the story of a people persecuted internally on two fronts and externally under the influence of international geopolitics, U.S. imperialism and the harmful impact of so-called humanitarian aid.
A Brilliant Genocide sheds insight into a horrid chapter in Ugandan history that is pertinent in its uncovering of the machinations and forces that continue to drive the suffering experienced in Africa - foreign interests, the humanitarian-industrial complex, and geopolitics, as much as internal power struggles that utilise military might as devices of oppression and personal enrichment. It seeks to end the silence and to expose the complicities attendant upon this tragedy.
Any film that corrects a maliciously misrepresented and misinformed mainstream narrative is an important film. A Brilliant Genocide is one such work.
Kudos Ethos Karma - June, 2018
The film features a range of Ugandans personally affected and involved in the genocide - former military officers, political figures, academics and ordinary villagers whose lives were ravaged by the violence they suffered under and witnessed firsthand. The picture that emerges is one of decades in which the people of Northern Uganda - in a continent historically besieged by imperial-mediated division and atrocity, dictators, foreign resource exploitation and poverty - suffered a fate that is recurrent in the annals of the region. It is the story of a people persecuted internally on two fronts and externally under the influence of international geopolitics, U.S. imperialism and the harmful impact of so-called humanitarian aid.
A Brilliant Genocide sheds insight into a horrid chapter in Ugandan history that is pertinent in its uncovering of the machinations and forces that continue to drive the suffering experienced in Africa - foreign interests, the humanitarian-industrial complex, and geopolitics, as much as internal power struggles that utilise military might as devices of oppression and personal enrichment. It seeks to end the silence and to expose the complicities attendant upon this tragedy.
Any film that corrects a maliciously misrepresented and misinformed mainstream narrative is an important film. A Brilliant Genocide is one such work.
Kudos Ethos Karma - June, 2018