Four movies to watch on the International Day of the African Child

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The International Day of the African Child has been celebrated on June 16 every year since 1991, and events are held on both the African continent and around the world.

Initiated by the Organization of African Unity (OAU), it commemorates the students who participated in the Soweto Uprising in 1976, when over 10,000 black students in Soweto, South Africa, protested their poor quality of education.

This year, the theme is "Leave No Child Behind for Africa’s Development."

If Africa is a faraway land where life is hard for us to imagine, scroll down to see some films featuring children and join CGTN to commemorate the day.

'Gangster’s Paradise: Jerusalem'

/Douban Photo

In the 1990s, Lucky Kunene was born in a slum in the Hillbrow neighborhood of Johannesburg and has seen the suffering of South Africans since he was a child.

Kunene is determined to escape from this predicament. He becomes a street thug, and after countless gunfights, bloodshed and violence, he becomes a gang leader in Johannesburg. But after all of this, the empire he created will come crashing down.

'Tsotsi'

/Douban Photo

Set in a slum named Alexandra in Johannesburg, South Africa, the story is about a young street thug named Tsotsi who becomes a gang member at a very young age.

The bad environment in which he grew up gradually formed his cruel and violent character. But when he carjacks a mom and later finds her baby in the backseat, he's changed forever.

'Sometimes in April'

/Douban Photo‍

The famous Frankfurt School scholar Theodor Adorno once said, "To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric."

"Sometimes in April" is a historical drama about the Rwandan Genocide of 1994. And through this film, we learn that it is naive to think there were no massacres after the Holocaust.

The massacre occurred between April 7 and mid-June in 1994 in Rwanda, and left at least 800,000 people dead. Many children were shot before they got to see the world.

'War Witch' (also known as 'Rebelle')

/Douban Photo

Somewhere in Sub-Saharan Africa, Komona, a 14-year-old girl, witnessed her hometown be destroyed by rebels and transformed into a rebel killing machine.

In all films that depict war-ravaged Africa, we must not forget that for victims, even though they are survivors, the scars of war may never fully heal.