Why did you produce the film “Lost Children”?

When you look around the world, you will notice that it doesn’t matter where or which catastrophe, children are always the weakest element in society. They are the ones, who are least responsible for the situation they are in. At the same time they are the ones who are most affected by the gravity of a crisis. There are more than 30 armed conflicts in the world. More than 300,000 children are being abused as soldiers. It doesn’t matter whether the parties of this conflict have set themselves high goals they are trying to meet: to abduct children or to force to kill is and will always be a crime. They steal their childhood and their future. A child who has killed, a child who went to war, is stigmatised for the rest of its life. The sad thing is that those victims are neither represented by an organisation, lobby nor a PR agency. They don’t know how to explain their trauma to other people. It is us adults who have to give them a voice. We need to listen to them and try to pass on the message. Obviously our personal experiences made us feel obliged to produce this film.

Why Uganda? Where there other countries open for choice?

As I already mentioned, there are more than 300,000 children in the world who share the same fate. We could have documented a similar story, as for example in Burma, Columbia or Angola. Unfortunately, the conflict in Uganda is the longest and the most unknown in Africa. At the same time, the way the aid organisations (=NGOs) re-integrate the children in society was very appealing to us. The question is how it is possible to give psychological aid to so many children, so that they can be re-integrated into society. Most probably it’s not via European methods, because there is neither time nor money to give professional help to so many people. This is why some of the NGOs, among the Gulu charity organisation, have opted for a combination between European and traditional methods. The clan is called on to accept responsibility too. It makes it more difficult for the clan to reject the children, hence paving the way back into society for them, as the clan rarely questions the success of rituals. Unfortunately this doesn’t always work, as we came to realise during the shooting.
forward >