Can you find beauty in squalor?  How do you extract grace and elegance from grim events?

The answer to the first questions is :It depends on your angle and where you choose to focus your lense.   To answer the second question you’d have to follow documentary filmmakers, Andrea Nix Fine and her husband, Sean, to the Patongo Refugee camp in Uganda, where children who have been ravaged by war tell their stories against the  backdrop of a music and performing arts talent competition.

Most of these children have experienced unimaginable horrors; yet their faces shine brightly and the pride in their voices is unmistakable as they tell their stories simply and boldly, without a hint of self pity.

The children of Patongo are competing for the first time in an annual music and performing arts competition.  They are disadvantaged - by our own standards.  After all, all they have are raw talent and some rudimetary tools from which to fashion musical instruments.  Yet, they manage to combine these elements and the natural Ugandan landscape to produce beautiful artistic self-expression.

The human spirit is indomitable.  Poets and philosophers have observed it in themselves and others, and have celebrated it in their writings.  The children of Patongo refuse to let their circumstances - or the filmmakers - define them.  They tell their stories on their own terms.  Their grace and elegance - and beauty- come through, proving (to  paraphrase Albert Camus) that in the midst of winter, there is, in each of us, an invincible summer.

War/Dance won the 2007 Sundance Documentary Directing Award and has been nominated for an Oscar.  It is now in national release.