I went to a screening of a short documentary the other night. The director, a filmmaker and college professor here in town, invited me with some friends to check out a rough cut of his documentary on children in Uganda. The documentary covers the story of rebel forces who kidnap children and force them into service.

The entire film is a short 31 minutes. The interviews are withdrawn, the memories shared are vague. To add depth and texture to narrations like "They kidnapped us, they took us back to the village and forced us to kill people we knew," the director shows drawings made by children in the rehabilitation center—like drawings of dismembered bodies with children holding machetes while soldiers point guns at their heads. The sheer magnitude of children who have been left to enter adulthood carrying around such memories is overwhelming. At the few rehabilitation camps for children in Uganda, nervous breakdowns are a daily spectacle.

Just at the point when I was feeling overwhelmed by this tragedy, the director cuts to a scene of a teenage boy survivor having dinner with his little sister and brother, all orphans. It reminded me of the spaghetti dinner in Cassavetes' A Woman Under the Influence, where the camera rolls while people eat and make conversation at their leisure, the way we do in real life. For me, this was the moment when I connected most to these kids in Uganda. It was then I was free to connect through something I've done everyday of my life—eat a meal. But these kids eat a meager dinner with no parents and no idea about where they would find food for the next meal. I felt a deep connection unlike I've felt with most documentaries, which typically focus on getting from one point to the next. Here, the filmmaker's plan was to simply let us be with these kids for a while.

But, as it turns out, that scene is going to be cut down. Grace, a girl who has survived the horrors in Uganda and is now in the states raising awareness about this issue, is the film's narrator and collaborator. To Grace's audience, the length of this scene is distracting. She's delivered her message before Congress and on the Oprah Winfrey Show, so she knows what she's talking about. But at the end of the film, she delivers a very flat monologue with rhetoric like, "a thousand children die every day," etc.

I realize I'm talking about real problems in the world, but as a Westerner, that kind of rhetoric at the end of a film about Africa is the kind of thing I've become desensitized to hearing. We talked with the director about this abrupt shift from dinner to monologue afterward. He explained he has made a decision not to make this his story. He's setting down his personal aesthetic to serve Grace, who strongly influenced these more "preachy" segments of the film.

I think it may be one of the most noble things I've ever seen for an artist to submit himself totally to his "subject" (for lack of a better word). Grace is adept at traveling around and delivering her message, but I'm not sure that means she's equipped to deliver a message to a theater full of filmgoers. This director is committed to removing himself from her story. But I worship at the church of storytelling, and those meal segments were among the best filmmaking I've seen. So as the filmmaker, should he have pushed back? Part of me says, "yes." The other part of me says, "Who the hell is he to decide what Grace's story should be? She lived it." I've been wrestling with this for a while and I'm still conflicted.