Role in Canadian film earns top actress prize for teenager
A Congolese teenager starring in a Canadian movie won the best actress award at the Berlin film festival Saturday night.
Rachel Mwanza, 15, is the star of War Witch, a drama set in the world of child soldiers in Africa.
She plays a 12-year-old girl who is kidnapped by rebel soldiers and forced to kill her own parents, then becomes the mistress of the leader of the rebel army.
She accepted the Silver Bear award for best actress from jury member Jake Gyllenhaal.
War Witch was directed by Kim Nguyen of Montreal, who found much of his Congolese cast among street people.
In a press conference last week, Mwanza said she had been living on the streets of Kinshasa, the capital of the Congo, after having been abandoned by her parents.
“I stand here because Mr. Kim made it all possible,” she said at the awards ceremony.
“That is how I had the strength to do it all.”
War Witch also received a special mention from the festival’s ecumenical jury for its humanitarian spirit.
The festival’s top prize, the Golden Bear, went to Caesar Must Die, a documentary by Italy’s Taviani Brothers (Padre Padrone), about inmates at a highsecurity prison who put on a production of Julius Caesar in which the events mirror their own lives.
The runner-up prize went to Just the Wind by Bence Fliegauf, a drama inspired by the true story of a spree of killings of Roma in Hungary.