I’m sure this movie made more sense in its film festival release last year, fresh off the World Cup. Its British director melds two grand traditions of UK cinema – the football film like Bend it like Beckham and the Third World/”poverty porn” genre, last seen winning prizes for Danny Boyle with Slumdog Millionaire. Her inspired genius is to tell a story about five African children who go on a cross-continent trek in order to attend the opening of the World Cup in South Africa.

The tykes start off in Rwanda and end up in Johannesburg, picking up a motley crew that must have written into the script because they are an allegory of Africa’s challenges: a HIV infected orphan, a former child soldier, an underaged sex worker. They play the world’s saddest song so skilfully on the world’s smallest violin so that your white man’s guilt may feel even more painful.

Through their fun and sometimes scary misadventures (sometimes approaching The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn), you’ll get a feel for the dark side of the real Africa. This being primarily a film for young children, the tendency is to gloss over this dark side with wildly improbable storytelling. Our child protagonists (who all speak English!) are always in danger but never really endangered.

As their adventures pile on, this becomes the Achilles heel of the film – the inability of the director and script to reconcile the tension between the aim to talk about the real Africa (and put much guilt into our dark white hearts) and the aim of making a cheerful children’s film where nothing realistically bad happens to our illegal border-crossing, gun-totting, car-jacking, yet incredibly naïve and very broke and hungry protagonists who seem to have survived solely on the goodwill of others.

Africa United is a film worth watching with an important social message so you should bring a child along. That way, you might feel a lot less cynical about this film.