The guerrilla conflict that has ravaged the Acholi people in Northern Uganda since 1986 has been a particularly nasty one. Canadian directors Jesse James Miller and Pete McCormack confront it head on in this straightforward, narrative documentary. They are unrelenting in their gory depiction of the horrors and brutality arising from the conflict, through interviews with victims, peace-brokers and former child abductees of the shadowy Lord's Resistance Army.

We learn how children were forced to butcher even their own family members as part of their "training." There are many heart-rending, shocking stories, among them that of a disfigured interviewee who was attacked while she was in the fields and had her ears and lips cut off with a razorblade after witnessing her friends being killed in similarly gruesome manner. The photographs and footage of dismembered bodies had several people heading to the exit during this screening, which suggests that the filmmakers might have gone just too far. But then not to show the true horror of the war would have been arguably irresponsible...

Narrated with a news-style voiceover, the doc leaves no doubt about the physical and psychological suffering the Acholi people have endured, yet, as the camera follows school children in one of the sprawling, muddy camps, it also shows that, in spite of everything, there is still hope. The film begins to connect the dots between Western exploitation in the region and the conflict, although it doesn't get far beyond a sketchy history lesson.

It ends on an ambivalent note, suggesting that while reconciliation and the pardoning of former LRA members has helped heal wounds, recovery for the Acholi people is still desperately fragile.