Articles by Jennifer Walden

“Ma! Ma!” 12-year-old child-soldier Agu (played by Abraham Attah) cries as he wraps himself around the woman’s legs. “I found you! I was looking for you!” The woman repeats, “I’m not your mother!” as she clings desperately to her own young daughter who is being pulled away by another child-soldier. Agu looks into the woman’s face, shocked to find a stranger looking back. “You’re not my mother! Witch woman! You fooled me!” he yells. The other soldiers grab the woman to rape her as Agu exits to the hall where the woman’s daughter is being stomped to death. Director Cary Fukunaga’s African war drama Beasts of No Nation – the first Netflix original feature film, feels so real that it’s disturbing to watch. “The connection we feel to this young man is unmistakable and if you allow yourself to get roped into it, as most of us do, then you can’t help but to have those feelings,” said the film’s sound mixer Geoffrey Patterson. “The story is told through Agu’s eyes and his intimate voiceovers let us know what he’s thinking. It’s also told through his ears, what he is hearing every step of the way. Creating that environment of what Agu was seeing and hearing was really important.” […]