MOVIES - NONFICTION FILM - 'War/Dance' walks a line of money/hope - The businessman in distributor Mark Urman saw a sensible deal in the tale of children at a Ugandan refugee camp. But there's a charity angle here too.
Mark Urman, head of ThinkFilm's U.S. theatrical division, was expecting little more than crudites, turkey wraps and inferior wine when he attended a fundraising party at a neighbor's house in New Jersey. The event was being held to help finance a documentary called "War/Dance," about the dispossessed children of Uganda. But Urman was in for a surprise: He found himself both moved and mesmerized by stirring images of resilient African children joyfully dancing and singing to the elegiac high notes of a xylophone. As the 7-minute reel of the then-unfinished film unspooled that spring evening in 2006, Urman realized that he had a strong business prospect before him.
During the small, informal gathering, Urman learned about how in Uganda a 20-year civil war between the brutal, rebel Lord's Resistance Army and the government had created a dire situation for tens of thousands of children, many of whom were being abducted from their villages and forced to become soldiers or sex slaves. But as the footage showed the children walking among human skulls and living in squalor, it also suggested there was hope, in the guise of a national music contest that was rallying the spirits of these unfortunate innocents. "Singing makes me forget," said a girl with a beatific voice. "Dancing is like closing my eyes."
Urman realized that "War/Dance" had everything a powerful film needed: sympathetic characters, unforgettable tragedy and the tension of a potentially uplifting ending. "I did not expect visual polish and artistry from a film funded in a potluck function way," Urman says. "I mean, it looked like a David Lean movie." He approached the husband-and-wife directing team, Sean Fine and Andrea Nix, and monopolized their attention in a corner of a room. He soon came to the conclusion that "they were real filmmakers and not missionaries" and eventually agreed to release the film. "As a distributor, I can't care about the issues," he says. "But they told me a narrative I could believe in."
After the successes of documentaries such as the Oscar-winning "Born Into Brothels" (about the children of prostitutes in Calcutta) and "An Inconvenient Truth" (about global warming), film distributors are recognizing that protecting a movie company's bottom line and following the consciences of well-meaning filmmakers is not necessarily an exclusive endeavor. "War/Dance," which opened on Friday, hopes to be the latest example of this phenomenon. ("Darfur Now," a documentary about the war in Sudan, opened strongly with an $8,000 per screen average in three theaters last weekend.)
