The Materpiece: Children of War

Children Of War shows how and why absolute power corrupts absolutely. Revisiting the Bangladesh war of liberation in 1971, it recreates with nerve wracking vividness the horrors of those times when suddenly a whole civilization was threatened with extinction. The director spares us none of the agonizing details. Why should he? When humanity suffered, first world countries turned their faces away. It's time to face the music. The unannounced midnight knock and the graphic rape that follows, the brutal slaying of refugees on the run as they are intercepted and shot point blank (in slow motion) on a river bridge as they try to escape, the leery Nazi-like army man urinating onto a prisoner's face. War never seemed more like a personal and political violation.

This is not a film for the squeamish. But then war was never meant for the civilized. The sheer incivility of a strife where one bully-section of a country decides to teach another section of the people a lesson, is captured in layer after layer of unstrapped brilliance portraying the complete collapse of compassion. The film is littered with passages of unbearable pain and, yes, agonizing beauty. It is an indelible irony of all visual arts that human hurt makes for great visuals. The lush lyricism that the director supplants to the suffering never takes from the powerful statement on pain and suffering. Cinematographer Fasahat Khan shoots the chilling nights with prowling predators and ravaged women captured together to emblematize the essential conflict between sexual aggression and vulnerable victims.

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