Idris Elba stars in "Beasts of No Nation" WE BACK (First Netflix Movie)

[Dr. Narcisse]

Attah was skipping class and playing soccer on a school field when casting director Harrison Nesbit walked over and asked him if he'd be interested in auditioning for a movie.

"We were playing football in front of a school, and a white man came and said we need some boys for a movie,” Attah said during a press conference at the Venice Film Festival. “So we went and we auditioned at a TV station in Ghana, and I was cast."

In truth, the process was a little more complicated than that, as Nesbit and Fukunaga have explained in subsequent interviews.

Fukunaga told the L.A. Times that the casting announcements they sent out on TV and radio in Ghana attracted mainly wealthy families whose kids didn't have the skills needed to play Agu or the other members of the film's army of child soldiers. So Nesbit visited schools and soccer games in Accra.

"Every slum has a broken-down school that's just way overpacked with kids. And in one of these, where we found Abraham, each classroom would let a certain amount of kids go to speak with me, and I wasn't really finding anyone that I felt was very interesting, so I took a walk around and there were a bunch of older kids skipping class it looked like, at least," Nesbit told Indiewire. "I saw that among the older kids was this young-looking guy, maybe 13 or 14. I asked him if he was interested in auditioning for a film. He said, 'No, not really.’ I guess he was shy. But later, kids kind of pushed him to do it. And once he got on camera, he just started rapping and there was just this kind of a charm about him, and we invited him to come to a callback session."

Nesbit auditioned about 1,000 kids, he told Indiewire, becoming impressed with Attah's charisma and emotional range.

"Cary had an image of what he wanted Agu to look like, so I had that in mind. And for that matter, I was looking for kids who had some sort of charisma," Nesbit told Indiewire. "He just has such a soulful presence about him and he has an incredible empathy, I think, with how he was acting. That he wasn't pretending, that it seemed like he was going back to things he had seen or just using his crazy imagination to put himself in these roles or in that position that we were asking. We were asking these kids to go to some pretty dark places pretty quickly, and Abraham had the emotional capacity to do that, and it was evident."

Fukunaga, who added at the Venice Film Festival presser that Attah was "playing hooky from school" when Nesbit discovered him playing soccer, explained there that he was impressed with the way the untrained actor was able to tap into his emotions.

“He improvised a scene in which his sister was taken away and he cried," Fukunaga said. "It just showed that he had access to his emotions in a way that we were looking for when we’re casting a movie. We need people, especially kids, who can access that part of their imagination very easily in front of a camera.”

He Wasn't Scared by Beasts' Violence While Filming, But He was Afraid of Idris Elba and Snakes:

Attah told the New York Times that despite the movie's many disturbing, violent scenes, he wasn't scared acting those out, noting that while his character becomes a killer, in reality, "No one died."

ven talking about the scene in which Attah's Agu kills a man with a machete, the actor said, "It wasn’t a real machete. I was holding a rubber machete."

Still, he was "scared" of Elba, who appeared quite large compared to himself.

"I was scared of him, because he was, like, very giant and I was small," Attah told The Times. "So I was afraid of him, but after he played football with us on set, it became normal for me to work with him."

Attah went on to tell The Times his favorite and least favorite scenes to film, comments he echoed during the film's Venice press conference.

"My favorite scene was [when] we were in the jungle, and I was in front of the audience, and behind me, we were going to kill the people who live in the village. So I was the commandant," Attah told The Times. "And the scene I hate was we were shooting in the jungle, and I was wearing shorts and slippers and Cary told me to pass through very deep bushes. And I was afraid to see any dangers that were in the bush."

Those "dangers" included snakes, Attah and Fukunaga revealed during the Venice press conference.


Attah is Focusing on His Education Now But May Continue Acting:

Fukunaga explained in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter at the Toronto Film Festivalthat Attah and some of the other kids from the film have been put into boarding schools and that education is taking priority over any consideration of an acting career.

"I want [Attah] to enjoy this experience, but I also don’t want him to be traumatized if the attention he’s getting right now disappears. So education is the first thing. We put him and a couple of the other kids in the film who were actually homeless into boarding schools," Fukunaga told THR. "A lot of them are just trying to get caught up to other kids their age. Abraham was luckier because he still has his mother and father, but he still comes from a very rough, poverty-stricken neighborhood. Making sure his education keeps going is the priority. If he wants to continue acting, we’re trying to create a support network for that."
Meet 'Beasts of No Nation' Agu Abraham Attah: Ghana Teenager Stars in Netflix Movie

 

[Dr. Narcisse]

^aint seen the movie yet, but he deserve it

Now that I finally seen the movie. Dude deserves a shot at the oscars at the moment.

The question is does he get moved to Supporting or should Idris go for Supporting (although some see him get a best actor nomination)?

 

[Silver Surfer]

Now that I finally seen the movie. Dude deserves a shot at the oscars at the moment.

The question is does he get moved to Supporting or should Idris go for Supporting (although some see him get a best actor nomination)?

Idris should get supporting

 

[Torrential]

Man Idris' character was dope until that rape shyt

I wanted Agu to kill him when they all left him

 

[PlayerNinety_Nine]

Now that I finally seen the movie. Dude deserves a shot at the oscars at the moment.

The question is does he get moved to Supporting or should Idris go for Supporting (although some see him get a best actor nomination)?

If Leo gets nominated for 'The Revenant' and loses out to Abraham in his first movie.

He at least deserves a nom, but I do feel a way about the only Black movies making it to the Oscars being the ones with, War, slavery and Civil Rights themes though

 

[Silver Surfer]

Man Idris' character was dope until that rape shyt

I wanted Agu to kill him when they all left him

That was an important scene....

 

[Jigganaut]

Movie was awesome but took everything out of me.

 

[JayGatsby]

Yoooo the rapping at the start of the film

And the TV scene ,great opening

 

[nalej]

Great movie. Idris and the kids both killed their roles.

 

[Dr. Narcisse]

She tore this movie to shreds

The entrance of the rebel Commandant, played by a “muscular” Idris Elba, is almost comical. In fact, sitting in the audience in the Ryerson theatre at the Toronto premiere, I seem to recall Elba’s appearance on screen inspiring laughter, even cheers. His immense, bare-chested body parted a sea of nameless, colourfully adorned young rebels, moving in to fill the frame, whose low angle gave the perspective of a child encountering a mythic beast. Although there are momentary glimpses throughout the film of a potentially deeper character study, Elba’s performance is rarely allowed to go beyond this initial caricature. This is a Commandant for the Kony2012 generation.

The film, unlike Uzodinma Iweala’s acclaimed novel of the same title on which it is based, approaches its material in a linear, almost procedural manner, taking its structural shape from the canon of slave narratives. In many ways, the proliferating accounts of child soldiers have taken the place that slave narratives used to occupy, though seemingly without the explicit abolitionist intention. Fukunaga demonstrates great narrative restraint, keeping his lens intently focused on the minute details and developmental stages of Agu’s transformation, and only hinting at the large socio-political and international forces that might be at play.

Stylistically, the film is seductive and undeniably engrossing: sweeping saturated landscapes, densely elemental forests, masterly use of light and shadows, and frames filled with carefully crafted symbolism. The politics of the belly, an expression coined by Cameroonians (“la politique du ventre”) and popularized by scholar Jean-Francois Bayart for describing African politics as consumption, appears in every inch of the script, of daily routines, and of the wider political landscape – IT’S OUR TURN TO EAT declares a banner hung on the side of a building in a newly captured town. Fukunaga’s influences are clear and many: the hazy, almost hallucinatory, atmosphere of Apocalypse Now"; the masculine construction of violent comradery in "Full Metal Jacket;" the boy, Antoine, addressing his crimes to the camera and, in the end, running out to the sea, for a potential return to innocence or a final end - we are not quite sure - in "400 Blows." And yet, for "Beasts," the lack of specificity and tendency to shy away from ambiguities leaves these resonances a bit hollow, more cinematic conceits than illuminating allusions."

For "Beasts," Africa is a Country (shout out to the exemplary and thoughtfully curated africasacountry.com). The film, taking its cue from the novel, does not specify in which country the narrative takes place beyond a vague “West African” referent (though nods to the conflicts in Sierra Leone and Liberia can certainly be detected with a careful eye). The film was shot on location in Ghana, a country without a history of such violent civil conflicts, thought not without civil strife, and indeed a country that supplies a great number of peacekeepers across the region, as audience member at the Toronto premiere, Canadian Lieutenant-General and Force Commander for the UN mission in Rwanda, Romeo Dallaire pointed out. This approach has its advantages – avoiding the complex historical and geo-political minefields of actual, often on-going conflicts and allowing space for a more universal and personal exploration. An argument could be made, though the film by no means goes this far, that the practice of child soldiers is one that cuts across national borders and reorders both families and nations in ways that need to be understood more transnationally. But denuding the film of a specific setting also risks singularizing the African story in ways Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie has warned us against. In "Beasts," the imperial myth that dichotomized Africans as either ruthless savages or noble savages, as animalistically amoral or purely innocent until tainted by the modern world, seems alive and well.

The only country mentioned by name in the film is Nigeria, with a Nigerian peacekeeper accepting to buy the empty “imagination TV” invented by Agu and his friends (a not-so-subtle jab at the stereotyped consumerism of Nigerians). This inclusion stands out, perhaps serving as a rebuttal to those who believed Iweala’s book was based on, or at least heavily informed by, the Biafra war of secession in Nigeria from 1967-70. This may have been a pragmatic choice, given the pushback faced by director Biyi Bandele from Nigerian censors when trying to release his adaptation of Adichie’s Biafra set epic, "Half of a Yellow Sun," in 2013 (a story which similarly includes the journey of a young boy turned rebel soldier, though the film cuts out most of Ugwu’s fascinating progression from domestic servant to unwitting rebel soldier to writer of the revolution).

I can only add to the universal accolades heaped on Abraham Attah for his embodiment of the character of Agu. His performance subtly moves from bewilderment to violent but still childlike tantrums and triumphs, and finally to an almost contradictory desensitized despair. And yet, how good he is provides a bit of a sting, revealing how much better the film around him could have been. For a film without a country, without a specific context from which to derive meaning, the viewer needed to be taken inside the psychological journey of this child, who himself remains only vaguely aware of the more complex historical and political contingencies unfolding around him. With such a rich body of literature around the experiences of child soldiers in Africa, and even the more personal and haunting studies of the subject matter in films like Kim Nguyen’s 2012 "Rebelle," it is a shame that Fukunaga limited what could have been a more acute psychological exploration in favour of a structure geared more towards political thriller, particularly in light of the intensely, almost tactilely, perspectival approach of Iweala’s novel. While what Fukunaga shows us is certainly horrific, he turns his camera away from the more deeply psychological traumas that Iweala will not let us avoid on the page. In the film, the sexual violence experienced by, and wrought by, these child soldiers is hinted at or seen in glimpses. In the novel, we have to touch it, to smell it, to feel it, to live with it.

In many ways, the potential filmic exploration I am describing has already been done. Although arguably not as technically masterful, Newton Aduaka’s 2007 film "Ezra" covers much of the same ground as "Beasts," following the life of a child soldier in an unnamed country, though the background of the conflict in Sierra Leone is here made much more apparent. But for Aduaka, this history is not a linear one, from idyllic childhood to horrific alienation and finally to return and possible salvation. For Aduaka, the trauma of the experiences of child soldiers is one that reaches back and forward in time; that radiates out to families and social networks who are at times victims, at others accomplices, but always witnesses; and that repeats and resurfaces in courtrooms, in Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, and in reintegration programs. While some might find Aduaka’s use of English problematic and his complicated chronological structure off-putting, his intent is clear: to demonstrate the disruption to time and memory itself caused by the deep, and widely shared trauma of violent conflict. Iweala’s narrative approaches the impact of trauma on memory and linearity in much the same way, a structural choice Fukunaga unfortunately eschewed in his adaptation.

The film ends with Agu and several of his fellow soldiers being taken into a rehabilitation camp. This has become a common tactic in Hollywood treatments of such conflicts, and a deeply problematic one. The rehabilitation camp as site of redemption or salvation seems to serve more to soothe a foreign audience that wants to leave the horrors they’ve witnessed in the voyeuristic spaces of the cinema than to prompt any deeper examination of the immense trauma, continuing violence, and complex local responses to the multiple difficulties of displacement, reintegration, and reconfiguration of social life in a post-conflict society.

It is not so much the graphic violence and horrific reality of children being turned into killing machines that make "Beasts of No Nation" difficult to watch, but the lack of space given to looking behind, beneath, and beyond this violence. In the end, "Beasts of No Nation" gives us little more than war porn. Beautifully shot and skilfully crafted war porn, but war porn nonetheless.

'Beasts of No Nation,' Violence of No Value

Before people come in

She is qualified
Dr. Julie MacArthur is an Assistant Professor of African History at the University of Toronto. She holds a PhD in African history from the University of Cambridge and has taught African history and culture at universities across Canada, the UK and eastern Africa. Her first book on mapping, ethnic identity, and dissent in colonial Kenya is forthcoming with Ohio University Press in Spring 2016, and she is currently working on two new book projects: one on mapping decolonization, sovereignty and border conflicts in eastern Africa and the other on the trial of the infamous Mau Mau rebel Field Marshal Dedan Kimathi. She has also worked extensively in the field of African cinema, both as a curator and an academic. She has worked as a programming associate with the Toronto International Film Festival and Film Africa in London as well as serving as the Director of the Cambridge African Film Festival for several years. She previously served as the Director of Content Acquisition for Buni.TV, an online platform for the distribution of African content, and she regularly curates film programmes and participates in film forums and festivals across the world.

 

[FrederickDouglas]

She is qualified

Qualified or not, I find most of her complaints to be invalid

Especially this one

In the film, the sexual violence experienced by, and wrought by, these child soldiers is hinted at or seen in glimpses. In the novel, we have to touch it, to smell it, to feel it, to live with it.

Glimpses were more than enough

 

[Big Blue]

She tore this movie to shreds

'Beasts of No Nation,' Violence of No Value

Before people come in

She is qualified
Dr. Julie MacArthur is an Assistant Professor of African History at the University of Toronto. She holds a PhD in African history from the University of Cambridge and has taught African history and culture at universities across Canada, the UK and eastern Africa. Her first book on mapping, ethnic identity, and dissent in colonial Kenya is forthcoming with Ohio University Press in Spring 2016, and she is currently working on two new book projects: one on mapping decolonization, sovereignty and border conflicts in eastern Africa and the other on the trial of the infamous Mau Mau rebel Field Marshal Dedan Kimathi. She has also worked extensively in the field of African cinema, both as a curator and an academic. She has worked as a programming associate with the Toronto International Film Festival and Film Africa in London as well as serving as the Director of the Cambridge African Film Festival for several years. She previously served as the Director of Content Acquisition for Buni.TV, an online platform for the distribution of African content, and she regularly curates film programmes and participates in film forums and festivals across the world.

This review is the epitome of overanalyzing. War porn? This movie did nothing to glorify war. This is why I hate academics sometimes.

 

[Fillerguy]

Qualified or not, I find most of her complaints to be invalid

Especially this one



Glimpses were more than enough

This film is far to below her pay grade for her to give an opinion of it. This wasn't made to be a documentary, its a work of fiction meant to invoke feelings.....why is she reviewing movies anyways


That's like a physicist writing a scathing review of star wars "New Hope brakes several laws of physics within the first 10 seconds....by the films end its clear Lucas and Co have never picked up a book."

Edit

MacArthur, Julie | Department of Historical Studies qualified indeed. What else can she teach us

 

[DuckSoup]

Still gotta peep, gonna be great

 

[re'up]

Loved the direction, loved score, a stronger script or tighter running time would have helped, as it is it's incredible, flawed, but not fatally. Third act is weakest. Is there a link to the soundtrack? Will post more later. Cinematography is haunting, beautiful, chaotic, the imagery is bloody and brutal, the acting amazing.

I saw this in theaters, would have lost some of it's power in Netflix at home for me...