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Description: Throughout the world, hundreds of thousands of children are kidnapped by marauding armies and transformed into child-soldiers. These soldiers help escalate the chaos and madness that has engulfed much of the African continent. Many were already orphaned by years of civil war, but they find a new kind of family in the brutal ragtag military that captures them body and soul. Ismael Beah's A Long Way Gone is a best-selling memoir of his experiences as a child-soldier in Sierra Leone, and now Ezra by Nigerian filmmaker Newton Aduaka becomes the first dramatic feature to do justice to this frightening phenomenon. Ezra's story is told in a series of flashbacks: Brainwashed by the military, he's given powerful amphetamine shots that keep him awake for days, destroy his capacity for conscience, and wipe out any memory of the bloody events in which he participates. (Film Forum)