93 min. or 58 min. | HD | DCP | DigiBeta | DVD | Blu-ray | original Englisch/Arabic/Dinka version with English subtitles
Synopsis
The documentary film WE WERE REBELS tells the story of Agel, a former child soldier who returns to South Sudan to help build up his country. The film accompanies him over a period of two years – from South Sudan gaining its independence in 2011 to the renewed outbreak of civil war in December 2013. As captain of the national basketball team of South Sudan – the youngest country in the world – Agel coaches the team through their very first international match against Uganda. The conflicts within the team bear a striking resemblance to the political problems festering across the country. An injury ends up forcing Agel to leave the basketball team, and he goes on to form an NGO that provides the country’s most remote areas with clean drinking water. His journeys give him time to reflect on his country – on how it was, how it is, and how he hopes it will be one day. As a child soldier, Agel had to kill and also lost almost all of his male relatives. Later he managed to flee via Kenya to Australia, where he became a professional basketball player and returned to South Sudan as a free man. Today, just two years after gaining its independence, the world’s youngest nation is once again teetering on the edge of a precipice: More than half a million people are fleeing the country, and Agel is fighting as a soldier once again.
awards: Grimme-Preis 2015 Nominiert für den Deutschen Dokumentarfilmpreis 2015 Brooklyn International Film Festival, USA, 2015, BEST DOCUMENTARY FIFDH - Festival International du film des droits de l'homme de Paris, 2016 - Main Award of the Jury
Internationales Dokumentarfilmfestival München, DOK.panorama, Deutsche Premiere, Deutschland 2014 as well as 2018 DOK.special Rwanda Film Festival, Kigali, Ruanda 2014 Ecrans Noirs, Yaoundé, Kamerun 2014 iREP Monthly Documentary Film Screening, Lagos, Nigeria, August 2014 Montreal World Film Festival, Kanada, 2014 International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam, 2014 Escales Documentaires de Libreville, Libreville, Gabon, 2014 DocPoint, Helsinki Documentary Film Festival, 2015 Nashville Film Festival, USA, 2015 Days of European Film, Prag, Tschechien, 2015 Input TV - television in the public interest, Tokyo, Japan, 2015 Brooklyn International Film Festival, USA, 2015 Human Rights Watch Film Festival, Nairobi, Kenia, 2015 Films from the South Festival, Oslo, Norwegen, 2015 Budapest International Documentary Festival, Ungarn, 2015 Sole Luna Treviso Doc Film Festival, Italien, International Competition, 2015 Ciné Droit Libre, Abidjan, Elfenbeinküste, 2015 FIFDH - Festival International du film des droits de l'homme de Paris, Frankreich, 2016
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