Indiewire: 8 Powerful Dramas About Coming Of Age in Captivity1 min read

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When the coming-of-age story meets the captivity drama, the results are often powerful, complex and hard to shake.

“Beasts of No Nation” (Cary Joji Fukunaga, 2015)

In “Beasts of No Nation,” the transition from childhood to adulthood happens in an instant. Agu, who we first meet as an imaginative youngster, is kidnapped and caught in the middle of a brutal civil war. Before the film even hits its halfway point, his innocence is fully transformed by the atrocities he’s seen and committed as the right-hand man to the Commandant (Idris Elba) and his band of guerrilla fighters. Agu has to become fearless and ruthless — or perhaps just numb — to survive in the world he’s been thrown into. By the end of the film, Agu has psychological scars that are beyond repair. When he talks to a counselor who tries to get inside the boy’s head and coax him into talking about his trauma, it becomes clear that after the things he’s witnessed, Agu no longer sees the world through a child’s eyes.

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