French documentary film-maker Jean-Stéphane Sauvaire (“Carlitos Medellin” & “A Dios”) makes his feature début with this highly disturbing little war film, adapted from the award-winning novel by Congolese author Emmanuel Dongala, which picked up the Regard Hope Award at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival.

15 year old Johnny Mad Dog (Christopher Minie), the commander of a rebel squad of child soldiers, and 16 year old Lakole (Daisy Victoria Vandy), a young girl trying to protect her young brother and invalid father, find their lives intertwined as the final days of the brutal Liberian civil war rage towards a tragic conclusion for all involved.

Christopher Minie and Daisy Victoria Vandy are truly superb at the head of an ensemble cast of unknown child actors including Dagbeth Tweh, Onismus Kamoh and Careen Moore as well as Joseph Duo who all do an amazing job naturalistically recreating the character that they themselves could have all to easily have become.

The film-makers have put their background in documentary film-making to good use in convincingly recreating a war-torn Liberia that is not so far passed and the result is deeply disturbing and almost unwatchable for an outsider like myself so I can only imagine how profound it must be on the people that lived through this nightmare.

“You don’t want to die – don’t be born.”