It can be very difficult to get one’s mind around this disparity. It’s a problem that War/Dance presents repeatedly, thought not usually so starkly.

The film’s primary focus is an annual national music competition for school children held in Kampala, Uganda’s capital, and the preparations and performances of the students of a primary school in a refugee camp in the country’s remote, dangerous north. In 2005, the year the movie crew arrived, 50,000 people were crammed into the Patongo Camp, which was built for a fraction of that total. These wretchedly accommodated people are only a small number of those displaced by this war.

Before they got there, more than half the camp’s children had been abducted by the Lord’s Resistance Army to serve in its rebellion. Most of them had lost immediate family members to this conflict. Patongo is so dangerously situated that it is guarded by Ugandan soldiers.

Yet, almost miraculously, the children of the camp’s school had already won a regional competition by this time, and were preparing for the finals in the capital. (Conditions held such peril that Andrea and Sean Fine, the film’s husband-and-wife directors, decided, since they were parents, that only he would remain in the camp to make their film.)

War/Dance

War/Dance centers on three kids: Dominic, the xylophonist; Rose, 13; and Nancy 14. Each has suffered what only other, similarly victimized people can really understand. The tall, grave Rose is a war orphan who lives with her aunt. This woman doesn’t want her niece to go to Kampala because it will interrupt the girl’s child-care and housekeeping duties.

Nancy is more vivacious, and still has her mother, but they’re bound by memories of one nightmarish day.

Dominic, except for his size (many of the youngsters seem small for their ages), is almost like a typical adolescent, until he faces the camera and relates a story he has never told anyone, and the film’s context becomes a challenge to one’s orientation.

The Fines haven’t produced a deliberately crude, on-the-run style, verité documentary. They’ve made it with a technical sophistication and aesthetic sheen. Indeed, a suspicion lingers that at least a little of what is captured isn’t entirely spontaneous. This isn’t to say what’s there isn’t authentic, only that some of it may have been modestly enhanced. And if it has been, it scarcely matters.

On its most obvious level, War/Dance is a stirring account of a triumph of youthful underdogs. But another, related narrative keeps intervening. That one involves the adaptability of the human spirit, especially of the young.

“It is difficult for people to believe our story,” Dominic says, “but if we don’t tell it, no one will.” He’s right. It’s difficult to understand the courage and generosity of these youngsters, and it’s difficult to believe their stories. But not because they aren’t true.