Can you locate Sierra Leone on a map? If you can’t, don’t despair — You’re in good company. And rest easy because the film I’m reviewing here — Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars — isn’t about war, but about music.

But until I watched the film, I didn’t know Sierra Leone had a decade-long rebel conflict that killed thousands and maimed many more — leading to the largest UN peacekeeping act of the decade to disarm militia and rebels.

Here’s an entire population of people made to live in refugee camps for a decade — living year after year in Guinea, a country not their own, on the goodwill of the UN and other peacekeeping forces. Living in fear of returning to a war-stricken homeland.

To bring hope, 6 musicians — members of a band called Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars — create makeshift cymbals by hanging metal clips from a hubcap, organize small community concerts, and compose lyrics about the refugee experience.

The result’s a communal music of sorts — one with a call-and-answer type chorus, with a band structure that allows other musicians to converge into the collective task.

No, the lyrics aren’t particularly nuanced or evocative. In fact, they’re bare-bones explanatory, descriptive. Yet perhaps this music serves a different purpose — serves to liberate refugees from the psychic and physical troubles they’ve had to contend with year in and year out.

A fascinating feature of Sierra Leone’s Refugee All Stars’ music is that — while the musicians say that the goal’s to help fellow refugees forget about their problems for a while, the songs themselves are in fact about the very difficulties and problems that refugees face, both in memory and in the present.

One band member’s a guy who, after being forced to beat his own child to death at the threat of his own life, had his arm chopped off. Due to his psychological pain, he’s never able even to leave the refugee camp –

Yet the film’s story’s a happy one. The other band members, at first afraid to return to Sierra Leone, visit their homeland via a “Go and See Visit” arranged by the UN (The UN doesn’t force refugees to return to their homeland; repatriation’s voluntary, even if encouraged). In the end, they decide to return to Sierra Leone.

In fact the band toured the US for the first time this summer — with a stop at the Hollywood Bowl.

The film’s available on DVD ($1 from each DVD sale goes to the Nine Million campaign, a UN Refugee Agency led campaign to raise awareness and funds for education and sport programs for refugee youth) and their music on CD — executive produced by Ice Cube with a collaboration with Aerosmith on John Lennon’s “Give Peace a Chance.” Buy those, or add the film to your Netflix queue.

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