All Are Human (2017)
★★★★½ — All Are Human (2017)
The Central African Republic has been caught in waves of communal violence for much of the last two decades, and the conflict between Christian and Muslim armed factions that erupted most ferociously from 2012 onwards left tens of thousands dead and hundreds of thousands displaced. It is a crisis that has received relatively little sustained attention from Western media, which makes any honest artistic treatment of it all the more valuable. All Are Human (2017), a short film running just over twenty minutes, takes its title seriously: rather than reducing that conflict to political abstraction, it places three individual lives at its centre, a Christian rebel soldier, a rebel's wife, and a Muslim doctor, tracing how their paths cross in ways that are both devastating and, in some measure, redemptive. The film is based on true accounts, which lends every scene a weight that fiction alone rarely manages.
The project is a co-production between the Central African Republic and the United States, released under the Novo Pictures banner, and was directed by Andrew Michael Ellis and Lindsay Branham, working in close collaboration with their subjects and their communities. Short-form documentary drama of this kind, shot on location with local non-professional or semi-professional performers, demands a particular kind of discipline from its directors: there is no room for padding, and the camera has to earn the trust of the people it is watching. The principal cast, Bachir So, Josette Melodie Agouh, Guillame Ngbowesse, and Mac Armel Degoto Conzry, are not household names beyond this film, and that anonymity, far from being a weakness, is part of what gives the work its raw, unmediated quality. These faces do not carry the baggage of other roles, and the result feels closer to testimony than to performance. If you enjoy short drama that approaches its subject with similar seriousness, it is worth comparing notes with the site's coverage of Lost Boy in Juba (2017), another 2010s film that looks unflinchingly at the human cost of conflict in sub-Saharan Africa, or with the review of Megdan: Between Water and Fire (2024), another drama in which ordinary people find themselves crushed between opposing forces.
Short films occupy an awkward space in how most of us consume cinema: streaming platforms bury them, festivals celebrate them briefly, and they rarely get the sustained critical attention that a feature would. Yet some of the most concentrated and honest filmmaking of any given year turns up in the short form, precisely because the constraints force choices that longer films can avoid. All Are Human sits comfortably alongside other small-scale dramas reviewed here, such as Sugar Cane Alley (1983) and Dhanmalhi (1993), films that use limited means to illuminate lives that mainstream cinema tends to overlook. Whether this particular short achieves what it sets out to do is, of course, for the review below to answer.
A-Z World Movie Tour Central African Republic https://vimeo.com/215053865 Wow. Based on true accounts... You know sometimes when the movie ends and you just let the credits roll and absorb what you've just seen? This is one of those shorts. I've said it once. I'll say it a thousand times. Movies are either an escape from reality or a reflection of it. This... is someone's story. Someone's actual story. The cinematography is stunning. The soundtrack is beautiful, haunting and melancholic. The story is real. The acting reflects that. My only gripe... is that it's too short. This story deserves more than 20 minutes. The lives of the people in it deserve more than 20 minutes. People get drawn into these conflicts and are forced to carry out the most barbaric acts. Nobody wins. I think I have to give this a near perfect score. Best short I've seen so far.
I stand by every word of that. Twenty-odd minutes is simply not enough for a story this layered, and the feeling of wanting more is, paradoxically, the film's greatest achievement: it has made you care so much that the ending feels like an interruption rather than a conclusion. The people whose lives fed into this film deserved a full feature, a proper theatrical release, and a much wider audience than a short has ever been likely to find. What stays with me most is that combination of beautiful, haunting cinematography and the knowledge that none of it is invented. Sometimes the simplest films carry the heaviest truths, and this is one of them.
Rating: ★★★★½ | Year: 2017 | Watched: 2025-05-31
Where to watch
Watch in the US
Physical: Amazon US
Affiliate disclosure: Movies With Macca may earn a small commission on purchases or subscriptions started via these links. It costs you nothing extra.
Related on Movies With Macca
More from the 2010s: Wonder (2017) · Beautiful Boy (2018) · The Witch (2015) · What We Do in the Shadows (2014)
More drama: Viy (1967) · Wonder (2017) · A Better Tomorrow (1986) · Beautiful Boy (2018)
