IT'S SNUFF, MATT
BUT NOT AS YOU KNEW IT.

Last night I performed a visit to Cardiff's Film Festival.

Because I'm vaguely interested by and yet somehow overwhelmingly uneducated about Colonialism, I thought it wise to have a watch of The Empire In Africa**, a documentary about the civil war in Sierra Leone.

And part of me wishes I hadn't gone.

I'm reasonably shamed to admit a fascination with inhumanity; the extent to which humans despoil and rape and destroy other humans; in truth a kind of removed, abstracted perspective on my part. I don't doubt that I share it with other people in the 'West', where our governmental systems are stabilised by food, buoyed by freemarket capitalism and economic growth and happy to let their peoples wander about with iPods, drinking, becoming vegetarian - you know, all the other peculiar things that happen when anarchistic, tribal civilisation ends and a post-humanism (of sorts) begins.

I watch violent films, play violent videogames, write comic-violence into my stories, talk about all sorts of ridiculous ways for humans to hurt eachother. And yet when it comes to real violence, visualised violence, humanised violence, real violence, I am horrendously sensitive to it. Horrendously. I've seen enough Iraq footage; enough blowing up; I've seen the beheading of a Russian soldier no more aged than me by (I think) Chechen rebel forces.

And yet, when Empire began, with the shooting of an unarmed, naked man, by a UN-backed Nigerian 'peace-keeping' troop, I began to sweat. The man falls and is shot again with a high-calibre assault-rifle at too close a range to comprehend.

And it just didn't end. Throughout there were decimated bodies being pecked at by carrion, a man lying chest down in acres of his blood, with us seeing his last moments, his teeth broken and splayed out beneath his mouth, laboured breaths until his head slumps to the curb. A man, stripped naked, pushed into some roadside scrub and shot twelve, fifteen, twenty times with an AK-47 until his body is just open, clusterbomb victims being loaded into ambulances, their tattered legs thrown in seperately as an afterthought. Children amputated, a dead baby lying among a lorry-load of smashed and mangled people. Photographs of a rebel captured by civilian militia, his body flayed by sticks and stone, his head mutilated and broken open, then later still his head, arms, legs, penis removed, put on stakes. The man from the opening scene shown again, only this time, after the second point-blank shot, after in close-up he's writhing and wriggling and in total bodyshock, he's shot again, in the face, and his head explodes in completely the opposite manner to the head that explodes in any horror film you've ever seen. All in lingering, never-flinching long shots. Never cutting away.

And then, the 'peacekeepers', a counter-counter rebel force, pull a boy of 9 perhaps, from the side of the road. And they strip him and stamp on him and kick and punch and truss him up like a pig, dislocating his shoulders and because you've already seen the men and women and children with white bags on their heads, slumped on posts, with what looks like navy blue washing line wrapping them captive, you know where he's going and he's making such distressed noises.

And I cried and cried and cried and cried.

Whatever the blame, and where ever it lies, and whoever with, and because the footage was so sharp and necessary against the voiceover, the politics of a ridiculous situation, Kofi Annan smiling against his UN-backed troops shelling, clusterbombing tiny villages, however polemical it might be as a piece, however critical you can be about it, however apologist it is for what I actually thought a clearly knowledgable and desperate rebel faction, however brutal and unflinching and disgusting it is, today I am changed, imperceptibly to you, maybe, but there's to me, inside, there's something afoot.

And yet still I can only urge you to watch it.

Not for your politics, not for your anti-Governmentalism, not for your anti-imperialism, not for being left wing.

But for being a person with a brain; for holding sentience and for knowing compassion. To understand sufferance more acutely. To see how the civilians of Sierra Leone have been demolished.

Back to normal tomorrow. Promise.

**
Interestingly the review on IMDB that you'll probably see if you've clicked through seems to jar entirely with what I took from the film in terms of a narrative. There were certainly no apologies made by the filmmakers for any prosecutors of the hostilities in my view.

If you want to see what other people thought of it you'd do well to go here. Some interesting stuff about how the director got hold of the footage.