Synopsis
Small Country: An African Childhood (Petit Pays, 2020) is a French-Belgian drama by Éric Barbier, available to watch online on iFILM. Burundi, the early 1990s. Ten-year-old Gabriel coasts through a comfortable neighborhood, chasing small adventures with his friends and little sister.
His father is French, his mother a refugee from neighboring Rwanda, and for a while home feels like a safe island. Then the adult world splits open: his parents drift apart, ethnic killings sweep the country next door, and the bloodshed soon crosses the border. A boy who was stealing mangoes yesterday learns to hear fear in grown-up voices long before he grasps what's behind it.
The film adapts Gaël Faye's autobiographical novel, a million-selling book crowned with the Prix Goncourt des lycéens. Barbier keeps the camera at a child's height, and the horror lands all the quieter for it. Jean-Paul Rouve plays the father, a man who keeps insisting the storm can be waited out. This isn't comfort viewing; it's a hushed memory of how war takes a childhood apart. Stream Small Country (2020) online on iFILM.
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