Sixteen

To rescue him from the horror of being a child soldier in the Congo, Jumah's mother gave him up for adoption. Now, on the brink of his 16th birthday, Jumah lives in London with his adoptive mother. But the dreams of his former life haunt him, and he is easily provoked to bursts of violence. One night Jumah witnesses a classmate commit a murder in an underpass. The classmate fears discovery and now Jumah is being threatened into silence, drawn dangerously close to a different type of war taking place in his school. The child soldier, who witnessed atrocities his fellow students can't imagine, is getting harder to control. Jumah only wants to be a barber, to live a normal life. But as the cycle of violence escalates around him, the point of supreme crisis is approaching. Riveting and intense, SIXTEEN bares his inner war to the viewer. Jumah has been pushed to the moment that will decide not only what type of man he will become, but whether or not he survives to become one. – C.R.