*** SPOILERS ***
I read the title of this weeks movie and right away got completely the wrong idea about what sort of movie this was going to be. Since becoming a mum, I find any kind of child murder/torture pretty near impossible to watch, so I worried how I'd manage with this one. However, it seems I was wrong about the plot line here.
The first 5-10 minutes of the movie were very, very difficult for me to watch, even moreso because it is real documentary footage of atrocities including World War 2, Vietnam and several famines. This footage is horrid! Not anything I haven't seen before and something we should never forget, but it's still difficult to watch none-the-less. The footage concentrates on the effects on the children and gives the scarilly high number of deaths in these atrocities which can be attributed to being kids. I've always found footage like this difficult, obviously because we know its real, but since becoming a mother, any kind of footage involving children is guaranteed to start me off. Make it real and you have one depressed young lady on your hands. The footage is interspersed throughout with an eerie soundtrack of children singing. The tune will probably stay in my head for weeks to come (along with some of those images). The point? To get through to the viewer what children have been put through over the years down to us adults. The biggest victim is always the children. Who's to say they won't have had enough of it being that way some day... and so to the premis of our movie.
The first 10 minutes and this footage seems to be the reason for the on and off of the DPP list. It really isn't required to 'get' the movie, but it certainly adds strength to the premis.