Analysis Of The Film Beasts Of No Nation

Beasts of no Nation (Cary Joji Fukunaga, 2015) follows the story of a young boy living in a country in West Africa during a time of civil war. The boy, known as Agu, lives with his mother, father, older brother, and younger sister in a small village where he spends his days helping his mother and playing with his friends. However, his carefree life is altered forever when the fighting breaks out in his village and the military executes anyone who they think might be a rebel soldier. His mother and younger sister manage to escape the village before the fighting starts, but Agu, along with his father and older brother, are left behind and find themselves in the midst of the bloodshed, kneeling at the feet of soldiers who have mistaken them for

There is a scene in which Agu and the other rebel soldiers in his unit storm a house and find a woman and small child hiding within. The woman and child are drug out of their hiding place, and when Agu sees them, he drops to his knees and hugs the woman's legs thinking that he she is his mother. This is one instance where Agu's tough façade disappears. He acts like the child that he is in the midst of fighting and gunfire as he clutches this woman. However, he quickly discovers that he was mistaken about the identity of the woman. He pushes away from her and curses her for tricking him. His defenses immediately go back up again, and he moves into the next room where one of his comrades is kicking the small child as she screams on the floor. Agu kicks the innocent child once too as he looks down at her with disgust. This action is in stark contrast to the image of him kneeling on the floor and clutching the woman's legs, and the framing of this shot deliberately does not directly show either of the children's feet striking the young girl. It is as if the image is too brutal for viewers to see, but they can still see that the perpetrators are only children. It calls attention to the brutality more so than if it had shown it directly. After kicking the girl, Agu walks back to the entry to the room where the woman is, and he pauses before going in. This is shown in a medium

The framing of these final shots is also extremely important and deliberate in the way in which it addresses the audience. Agu is free from the group of rebel fighters at the end of the film and is talking to a woman who wants him to put what happened to him into words. He is sitting across the table from her, and when she asks him to talk to her, he initially refuses. We again hear his voice through narration, and he says that she thinks he is like a baby, and that is why she thinks he will not talk to her. It is very similar to how Agu questioned Strika the first time they met. He had asked Strika if he was stupid since he wouldn't speak. Now, their roles are reversed, and Agu understands why he is unable to speak to the woman. She has not experienced what he has and will never understand. When Agu does speak to her, it is through a medium close up that we see his face, and he is looking almost directly at the camera. The camera is positioned in a way that makes is look like it is placed directly in front of the woman facing Agu. He begins speaking to her, but it looks as if he is speaking directly to the audience. He says that if he tells about what he did, it will make him sound like a beast. People won't remember that he is only a child and had a family once. He says that all he wants is to be happy in life, and implies