Newton I. Aduaka thought he knew the movie he was making. It was an exposé on African warlords, with a focus on the generation of “child soldiers” that had been systematically recruited, drugged, and indoctrinated into the numerous rebel armies wreaking havoc across the continent. But it wasn’t until the filmmaker, who has made his home in France, put down his pen and hopped an airplane that everything about his script, some two years in development, changed.

“We had done all the researching and investigating you might expect, but then we took a trip to Sierra Leone,” Mr. Aduaka said recently. “I realized we had spent our time really writing something conventional, something very cold. What shocked me was not just the violence, but the psychological aspect of the children we confronted, the way that their lives had been destroyed and they had become swept up in something they did not even understand.”

Mr. Aduaka spoke to more people and filed more horror stories away in his mind. What most struck the native of Nigeria was how far removed these personal anecdotes were from the images he had seen of these war-torn nations in the reports of the first-world media.

“These wars — people stop talking about them,” he said. “The media stops covering them. But what made me mad was realizing that these conflicts continue, and the people caught up in them carry something with them long after we’ve stopped looking.”

In the days and weeks following his African trip, Mr. Aduaka found himself re-imagining his war film, shifting his focus away from a procedural case study of genocide and its underlying dynamics and toward a tragic character study of the young men caught up in the bloodshed. The result — the blunt, bracing, and brutal “Ezra” — has emerged as an international sensation. After devastating audiences at last year’s Sundance Film Festival, it screened as part of the 46th International Critics’ Week sidebar at Cannes and went on to win the Golden Stallion at Fespaco, the top award at Africa’s top festival. It opens in New York at Film Forum on Wednesday. “Ex-child combatants in the audience, they tell me, ‘This was my life,’ and I made an oath to myself when I started that I would make something that actually represents what people have had to go through,” Mr. Aduaka said.

Named for its central child soldier, “Ezra” opens and closes with sequences depicting a “Truth and Reconciliation Commission” in Sierra Leone, a fictional variation on real-life panels that were convened by the nation following its decade-long civil war. The panels were designed to wade through the injustices of war and allow communities to begin the healing process. In 2000, the movie claims, some 300,000 children around the world were used as soldiers in 30 countries, 40% of them in Africa.

Between these sequences at the public forums, we come to learn just what crimes Ezra (played bravely in the character’s older years by Mamoudu Turay Kamara) has committed during a decade of war. As a 6-year-old, he is abducted by rebels and immediately witnesses the arbitrary assassination of one of his classmates. The ensuing state of shock and fear is augmented by his captors, who subject the boy to an array of brainwashing sessions during which he is told he is a child of the revolution and that he must forget his family and embrace his new “brotherhood.” Any resistance is broken by the methamphetamines Ezra and his peers are fed, which allow the warlords to turn these young armies into wild, hallucinating hordes, willing to commit just about any atrocity.

“It’s truly terrifying,” Mr. Aduaka said. “There’s many reasons all these children could be so effectively broken down and programmed. They found a kind of family here in these armies, a false sense of importance by being given the title ‘captain’ or ‘commander.’ The ones that really struck me were the children who were forced to kill somebody — immediately reminding them of how fragile their life is, and that the only way they are going to survive this is by being a ‘good’ soldier.”

Mr. Aduaka, 42, can still recall his family’s relocation in 1970 to Lagos at the end of the Biafran War. In 1985, he left for England, where he first studied engineering before enrolling in the London International Film School in 1990. “Before I made the film, I don’t think I realized how much was locked in my subconscious about the Biafran War,” he said. “But as the movie went on, and I started seeing these vivid re-creations of memories where my parents and family were fleeing from the encroaching war, I realized that, heck, if I have all these nightmares, then what about all these other kids who have had to deal with far more atrocious things?” Mr. Aduaka’s debut full-length feature,”Rage” (1999), about three inner-city friends plotting a heist in order to finance the recording of a hip-hop record, made history in Britain as the first independently financed film by a black artist. But with “Ezra,” a project Mr. Aduaka describes as “cathartic,” there is a certain coming-to-grips with an issue to which the world seems all but oblivious.

“Part of this whole project is that there are questions that keep me up at night,” Mr. Aduaka said. “You look at Africa, at all these kids holding AK-47s. We don’t make those weapons in Africa. So where are they coming from? Everything is connected, and we need to realize that. And this has an impact for Europe and America, too, because if you allow this area of the world to be destroyed, people have a survival instinct and they will leave Africa and there will still be anger at why their home was destroyed. It’s not just Africa’s problem; it should be our problem, too.”

ssnyder@nysun.com