It’s been less than 12 months since my last trip to Uganda, and I find myself jarring along in a Land Cruiser, camera in hand, headed through the northern town of Gulu with a small team. 15 days into this film trip and it’s been an awakening. This is my third trip to the north, yet Gulu still unsettles me. Less than 10 years ago this hot dusty town was the staging ground for some of the most horrific rebel fighting on the planet, a nightmare carried out by children who’d been abducted, brainwashed, and forced to kill. It’s the darkest town I’ve ever experienced, the only light coming from the headlamps of our Cruiser. People seem to appear out of the dark, slipping in and out of the cast of our headlights.
It was here, just three years ago, that my team and I unknowingly interrupted the start of a tribal war when we randomly stepped into the village to pick up orphaned twins. The night before, a woman had been brutally killed with a machete after she had denied her husband. The murdered wife’s tribe had then declared war on the husband’s tribe. On our way out we passed … READ MORE >
